Getting more data from each SMS message you send with MessageBird
Bird
11 Jan 2021
SMS
1 min read
Key Takeaways
Bird’s upgraded SMS API now includes real-time insights such as price per message, currency, country, operator names, message length, and status reasons.
Businesses can integrate this data directly into Business Intelligence (BI) tools for live reporting and ROI tracking without needing manual dashboard lookups.
The update enables cost transparency by returning billing details in both API responses and webhook reports.
Marketers can now calculate ROI instantly for SMS campaigns and understand exactly where and why a message failed.
Metadata like MCCMNC codes and descriptive country/operator names support more granular analytics and audience segmentation.
For omnichannel strategies, SMS can be used as a fallback channel when WhatsApp delivery fails — ensuring maximum reach and deliverability.
This rollout reflects Bird’s focus on customer autonomy, providing complete visibility and faster decision-making for messaging operations.
Q&A Highlights
What’s new in Bird’s SMS API?
The SMS API now provides detailed metadata, including message cost, currency, delivery status, and operator information — available in both the API response and webhook report.
Why is this important for businesses?
It allows real-time cost tracking, better campaign ROI analysis, and greater transparency — without relying solely on post-campaign reports.
How does this update improve marketing performance?
With per-message data, teams can analyze delivery efficiency, optimize budgets, and identify which carriers or regions drive the highest engagement.
Can I integrate this data into my analytics tools?
Yes — all new fields are accessible via API and webhook, allowing seamless integration into BI dashboards like Tableau, Looker, or Power BI.
Does this affect my existing SMS setup?
No action is required. The rollout is backward-compatible, so your current integration will continue working while gaining access to the new data fields.
When sending a marketing campaign, for example, you need to know how much the messages cost in order to know the ROI of the campaign.
It is all about data nowadays. For businesses using multiple channels, you can also set up SMS as a fallback when WhatsApp messages fail to ensure maximum deliverability. Especially with messaging, we want to understand what happened with our messages: like where they were delivered, or how much they cost. When sending a marketing campaign, for example, you need to know how much the messages cost in order to know the ROI of the campaign.
Seeing this demand, MessageBird’s SMS API will now include information on the price per message and metadata like country and operators’ names for every SMS message you send with us. This should help improve the communications you send to your users and give you more insight around those messages. We will perform this change as a gradual rollout over the next two weeks.
That means that you can get all the information you need without sending a message to our dear Customer Success team. You can also integrate that information into your own Business Intelligence tools for reporting purposes. Our hope is to enable as much autonomy and velocity on decision making for our customers as possible.
What’s the update?
We’ve upgraded our SMS API to provide price information, currency, country and operator names, status reasons, and more on its response and in the report webhook URL. So, on top of the current information we share, the SMS API response will now provide fields like:
Recipient country: name of the country where the recipient number belongs to
Recipient country prefix: international country code number (e.g. +31, +58, etc)
Recipient operator: MCCMNC code and name of the network operator to which the number belongs to
Message length: number of characters that the body of the message has
Status reason: a written description of the reason for the status of the message. For example, if it failed, why it failed
Price: price cost of that specific message it was billed with
Currency: the currency the specific message was billed with
What’s the benefit?
How does it look?
The response of the API will now include this new information, see below under the “statusDatetime” line:
And reportURL will look like this:
