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Understand Timing and Tracking
Understand timing and tracking in Email Studio for Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Tracking in this context refers to sending messages to recipients and all the interactions recipients have with them. We refer to each interaction as an event but as a fact when stored in the database. The first event that occurs in any interaction with a recipient is a Send. Here are other interactions we recognize and store:
- Deliveries
- Bounces
- Opens
- Clicks
- Survey Responses
- Conversions
- Forwards
- Complaints
- Unsubscribes
While it depends on many factors including some feature settings, a given send takes place over time. A send in this context is all the individual messages sent to a target audience. Sometimes it can span hours and, in extreme cases, days. The date and time that the system records for a send fact reflects when the send is injected into a Message Transfer Agent, a device that governs the actual transmission of the mail to the recipient domain. This value doesn't indicate when we send a message nor when it arrives at its final destination. Therefore, a response event, anything we track after the original send, does not predate the send itself.
A given send can occur at 12:05 PM, but does not appear on a report or data extract. The processes behind how the system stores that data expressly for retrieval differs from that which is used to build the contents of the email. The system processes events asynchronously to achieve the desired throughput. This process results in a delay between when an event actually occurs and when you're able to see it.
How long can it be between when an event occurs and when it's realized? It is best described with probabilities: our measurements indicate that 84% appear within one minute, 96% within 15 minutes, and 99% within 60 minutes. While these probabilities cannot have a material impact relative to conclusions you draw from the data, it does when looking at any given range of data over two or more successive examinations.
Example
You ask for a listing of sends occurring between 6/1/2009 at 12:00PM through 6/2/2009 at 12:00 PM. The first time you ask (on 6/2/2009 at 12:05PM) the result is 8,640. If you ask the same question tomorrow, that answer is 10,000. While all the work in building and injecting emails was complete by noon, a portion (10,000 - 8,640) of those sends were not yet realized as facts within our data system at 12:05 PM when you asked the question. Date-based extracts or reports have a greater level of fallibility when the upper range of the time span is relatively close to the present, the time at which the request is made.
Additional Information
From the time a send occurs until about three days later, your delivery rate is destined to drop sharply within 15 minutes of the send event and more slowly for the duration. This is because of how bounces work. Most bounces (80%) occur during the process of sending to a specific recipient. Yet behaviors vary among recipient ISPs with Yahoo.com being a prime example. Due to the extraordinarily high volumes, Yahoo accepts everything sent to them and only later makes a determination relative to deliverability. Depending on the timing, you could see your deliverability rate drop several percentage points within minutes.
The delivery to a recipient domain is attempted more than once. The internet could be down or a recipient ISP, most typically smaller organizations, could be doing maintenance on their mail servers. Our MTAs are configured to keep trying for 72 hours. Intermediate failures are not recorded, but only the terminal failure is recorded when the retry window has expired. Expiration can result in a rash of bounces approximately 72 hours after the first send attempt.
Opens, clicks, and remaining response events rise over time because the recipient doesn't act upon an item in their inbox the instant it appears. We recommend not drawing definite conclusions from tracking data where the send has occurred less than seven days ago. Our current record is an Open that occurred 14 months and 6 days after the send.
