# Email metrics The **Metrics** page in the Bird dashboard is where you see how your email is doing: how much of it reached the inbox, how recipients engaged, and whether your bounce or complaint rates are drifting toward trouble. This guide explains what each number means and when to act on it. Metrics are the aggregate view across everything your workspace sends. For the per-recipient outcome of a single message (did _this_ address bounce, open, or click), see [events and webhooks](/docs/guides/email/events). To pull the same aggregates programmatically, use the [stats API](/docs/guides/email/stats-api). To control how opens and clicks are recorded in the first place, see [open and click tracking](/docs/guides/email/open-click-tracking). ## Read your metrics The [**Metrics**](https://bird.com/dashboard/w/email/metrics) page lives at **Email → Metrics** in the Bird dashboard. Every number respects the range picker in the top right (last 24 hours, 7, 30, or 90 days) and updates as new events arrive, so a report you open now reflects sends and engagement up to the last few minutes. ![The Metrics page in the Bird dashboard: the delivery, open, bounce, and complaint rate cards above the delivery and engagement over time chart](/images/docs/dashboard-email-metrics.png) Rates attribute by **event time, not send time**: engagement earned today for a message sent last week lands in today's numbers, and a bounce that arrives hours after the send counts when it arrives. ### The four health cards The row of cards at the top is your at-a-glance health check. Each shows a rate for the selected range, the count behind it, and a **Healthy** or **Risk** label so you can tell at a glance whether anything needs attention. - **Delivery rate**: the share of delivery attempts that ended up, and stayed, successfully delivered. Bird marks it Healthy above 95%; below that, something is rejecting your mail (bad addresses, authentication gaps, or reputation problems) and the bounce breakdown tells you which. - **Open rate**: unique opens Bird can attribute to a person, as a share of delivered mail. Healthy above 35%. Privacy proxies auto-open images, so Bird excludes prefetched opens from this rate (how that works: [open tracking](/docs/guides/email/open-click-tracking#open-tracking)). Even so, treat opens as a soft signal: a missing open doesn't mean the message went unread, so prefer clicks for decisions that matter. - **Bounce rate**: the share of delivery attempts that failed. The card shows your rate against a **5% limit**; at or above it the card flips to Risk. Sustained high bounces mean list-hygiene problems and put your sending reputation at risk. - **Complaint rate**: the share of delivered mail that recipients marked as spam. The limit here is **0.1%**: small, because mailbox providers act on complaints fast. This is the number to watch most closely; crossing it can get your mail throttled or blocked at the provider. The 95% / 35% / 5% / 0.1% thresholds are the guardrails Bird uses to color the cards. They are deliberately conservative: a card can read Healthy and still have room to improve. The exact formula behind each rate, including how late out-of-band bounces adjust the delivered denominator, is documented per field on the [stats summary reference](/docs/api/reference/get-email-stats-summary). ### Delivery & engagement over time The main chart plots **sent**, **opened**, and **bounced** volume across the range so you can spot trends and one-off spikes: a bad send, a list import gone wrong, a campaign that landed well. The bucket size follows the range (hourly for 24 hours, daily for longer windows). ### Bounce rate and its causes Below the chart, the bounce card breaks your bounces down by cause, so a rising bounce rate points you at the fix: - **Hard**: permanent failures (invalid address, non-existent domain). These auto-[suppress](/docs/guides/email/suppressions) the address. - **Soft**: transient failures (mailbox full, server temporarily unavailable). Bird retries these. - **Block**: the receiving server blocked your sending IP for reputation reasons. - **Admin**: administrative refusals (relaying denied, a blocklisted domain). - **Undetermined**: the server's response was too ambiguous to classify. - **Out-of-band**: a late bounce that arrived _after_ the receiving server had already accepted the message, retracting the earlier delivery; the recipient moves to `bounced` and drops out of the effectively-delivered count. These map to the same `bounce_type` values on the event stream; see the [bounce classification table](/docs/guides/email/events#bounce-classification) for the underlying codes. ### Complaint rate over time The complaint card charts your spam-complaint rate across the range. Because the healthy ceiling is so low, watch the _shape_ here as much as the number: a steady climb, even below the limit, is an early warning that a segment or campaign is annoying recipients. ### Delivery latency The latency table shows how long messages take to move through the pipeline, split into **Processing** (Bird accepting and queueing the message), **Delivery** (time at the receiving server), and **Total**, each at the p50, p95, and p99 percentiles. Use p95/p99 to catch the slow tail: a healthy median with a slow p99 usually points at one provider deferring your mail. ### Breakdowns The **Breakdowns** panel slices the same delivery and engagement numbers three ways, so you can compare senders side by side and isolate a problem to its source: - **By domain**: each sending domain's sent, delivered, bounce, open, complaint, and health status. - **By IP**: the same per sending IP, with the pool each IP belongs to. - **By tag**: the [tags](/docs/guides/email/sending-email) you set at send time. This is the most flexible cut: tag a campaign, template, or experiment variant and compare them directly. Each tab ranks the top senders for the range and supports a search filter; when a dimension has more distinct values than fit, the panel notes "Top N of M". The [stats API](/docs/guides/email/stats-api) offers these three cuts and ten more. ![The lower half of the Metrics page: the delivery-latency table (processing, delivery, and total at p50/p95/p99) above the Breakdowns panel, with delivery and engagement broken down by sending domain, IP, and tag](/images/docs/dashboard-email-metrics-breakdowns.png) ### A note on sandbox traffic Sends to [sandbox addresses](/docs/guides/email/testing-sandbox) on `messagebird.dev` **count toward these metrics**: a heavy test run moves your dashboard numbers and bounce/complaint rates. Because sandbox sends never leave Bird, they never affect your real sending reputation, but keep them in mind when reading a range that includes testing. ## Advanced analytics The Metrics page covers your own sending. Two Bird products go further, beyond what you can see from your own event stream: - **[Inbox Tracker](https://bird.com/en-us/products/email/inbox-tracker)**: inbox placement monitoring, showing where your mail actually lands (inbox, spam, or missing) across mailbox providers, plus authentication and reputation signals. - **[Competitive Tracker](https://bird.com/en-us/products/email/competitive-tracker)**: benchmark your email program against competitors, including their send volume, campaign cadence, and subject lines. Both are enterprise add-ons; [contact sales](https://bird.com/en-us/demo) to discuss access. ## Next steps - [Stats API](/docs/guides/email/stats-api): pull every number on this page programmatically. - [Open and click tracking](/docs/guides/email/open-click-tracking): the instrumentation behind the engagement numbers. - [Events and webhooks](/docs/guides/email/events): the per-recipient event stream behind the aggregate view.