Tracking & 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 starts with that page — what each number means and when to act on it — then explains the open- and click-tracking instrumentation that produces the engagement numbers behind 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.
Read your metrics
The 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.
Rates are computed against 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 accepted messages that reached the recipient's mail server. Bird marks it Healthy above 95%; below that, something is rejecting your mail (bad addresses, authentication gaps, or reputation problems) and the bounce breakdown below tells you which.
- Open rate — unique opens as a share of delivered mail, counting only opens Bird can attribute to a person (see prefetched opens below). Healthy above 35%. Treat opens as a soft signal: a missing open doesn't mean the message went unread (text-only clients, blocked images), so prefer clicks for decisions that matter.
- Bounce rate — the share of messages that failed delivery. 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're deliberately conservative — a card can read Healthy and still have room to improve.
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 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 message was already accepted; it doesn't change the recipient's delivered status but still counts against your sender health.
These map to the same bounce_type values on the event stream — see the bounce classification table 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 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".
A note on sandbox traffic
Sends to sandbox addresses 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.
How tracking works
Open and click tracking are what turn a delivered message into the engagement numbers above. You enable them per sending domain on the Domains page (Email → Domains), where you also add the tracking CNAME. Both are opt-in and instrument each message as it's sent.
Open tracking
When open tracking is enabled, Bird injects a transparent tracking pixel into the HTML part of your message. When a recipient's mail client fetches the pixel, Bird records an email.opened event.
Modern inboxes complicate this signal: Apple Mail Privacy Protection and Gmail's image proxy auto-fetch images on the recipient's behalf, producing opens that no human triggered. Bird flags these as prefetched (is_prefetched: true) on the open event and counts raw and non-prefetched opens separately. Your open rate is based on unique non-prefetched opens over delivered, so privacy-proxy noise doesn't inflate it — and a recorded open may still be a proxy prefetch, which is why opens are a soft signal.
Click tracking
When click tracking is enabled, Bird rewrites the links in your HTML through a tracking redirect: the recipient clicks the rewritten URL, Bird records an email.clicked event (including the original url), and immediately redirects to the destination.
Rewritten links are served from your domain's branded tracking hostname — the tracking CNAME you configure on your sending domain (by default links. under your sending domain). Click and open tracking only run once that CNAME has verified; until then nothing is rewritten or pixelled. Once it verifies, tracked links are served over HTTPS from your own branded hostname. Tracking readiness is reported separately from sending readiness (capabilities.tracking vs capabilities.sending on the domain resource) — an unverified tracking CNAME never blocks sending, only tracking.
Per-send toggles
track_opens and track_clicks are per-send booleans on POST /v1/email/messages, and both default to true. Set either to false to skip pixel injection or link rewriting for that send — common for transactional mail where rewritten links are undesirable (password resets, security notifications).
Effective tracking is the AND of the per-send flag and your domain's tracking settings: a message is tracked only when the per-send flag is true, your domain's open or click tracking setting is enabled, and the tracking CNAME has verified. Those domain-level settings default to off, so even though track_opens and track_clicks default to true, opens and clicks aren't tracked until you set up and verify a branded tracking domain and turn the setting on — a per-send true can't enable tracking on its own. A per-send false always suppresses tracking for that message. The message resource echoes the resolved values back on reads.
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 — inbox placement monitoring: where your mail actually lands (inbox, spam, or missing) across mailbox providers, plus authentication and reputation signals.
- Competitive Tracker — benchmark your email program against competitors: their send volume, campaign cadence, and subject lines.
Both are enterprise add-ons — contact sales to discuss access.
Next steps
- Events and webhooks — the per-recipient event stream behind the aggregate view
- Sending domains — setting up the tracking CNAME for branded links
- Sending email — track_opens, track_clicks, and tags on the send payload