Spam Complaints in Marketing Cloud Engagement

Reaching an audience receptive to your messaging with content they want is key to an effective campaign. It's a self-reinforcing cycle - healthy engagement leads to better inbox placement, and better inbox placement makes it possible to reach more subscribers interested in your content.

You might already be tracking positive engagement indicators - opens, clicks, and conversions. Paying attention to complaints - and minimizing them - forms the other half of the engagement picture. 

Feedback Loops

Some email providers offer a mechanism, the feedback loop (FBL), which transmits individual complaints against an IP or domain to a designated party. In Marketing Cloud Engagement, sending IPs and authenticated domains are automatically registered for available FBLs. Complaints transmitted by FBLs are ingested by our platform, stored for review, and actioned.

Data about ingested complaints is standardized and inserted into the _Complaint data view. Complaint records are part of standard and Intelligence reports, and can be retrieved through extracts, query activities, and API methods. Information from the message envelope included in complaints is used to attribute them to individual sends and subscribers.

Complaints result in automatic unsubscribes. Complaint-driven unsubscribes can be distinguished from other opt-outs by exporting unsubscribes from All Subscribers and reviewing the Reason field.

Compare the complaints received at a participating provider with the total number of sends to the same domains to arrive at a spam rate for that provider.

GMail Spam Rate and Feedback Loop

GMail sender guidelines require that senders maintain a 0.3% spam rate or below, and recommends a rate of less than 0.1% for best placement. To find the spam rate for a sending domain, enroll in GMail Postmaster Tools (GPT). If DNS for your authenticated domain has been delegated to Marketing Cloud, first add the domain to GPT. Then, open a support case to have GPT’s TXT verification record added to the domain. The top-line complaint rate mentioned in sender guidelines can be found in GPT’s Spam Rate section.

In contrast to most other FBLs, GMail does not transmit individual complaints back to senders, so complaints will not appear in the _Complaint data view. Data is available only in aggregate at the Feedback-ID Identifier level. Marketing Cloud sends include 3 Feedback-ID Identifiers: MID, JobID, and sending IP.

Authenticated domains are automatically enrolled in GMail’s Feedback Loop and messages include the Feedback-ID header required for participation.

GMail’s FBL reports can be found in GPT’s Feedback Loop section. Daily reports are generated only if GMail detects that a given Identifier exceeds both a total volume threshold and number of distinct complaints. As a result, spam rates shown for Feedback Loop may appear significantly different from those in Spam Rate — for example, if the overall complaint rate is low but particular campaigns (Job IDs) suffer from poor responses.

Regularly review both the overall spam rate and flagged Feedback Loop identifiers.

Reporting

Use Email Studio Reports’ Spam Complaints Over Time report to see complaint rates by provider at a glance.

For aggregate counts across dimensions like Job ID or Triggered Send, create a Pivot Table in Intelligence Reports. Start by dragging the Email Total Complaints measurement type to the values section, then choose from the dimension list as needed.

To identify individual subscriber complaints, use a query activity referencing the _Complaint data view. Join other tables to make the result set more useful. Try this as a starting point:

Query: Recent complaints, 14 days

SELECT c.EventDate, c.JobID, j.FromEmail, j.EmailName, c.Domain, s.EmailAddress
FROM _Complaint c
JOIN _Job j ON j.JobID = c.JobID
JOIN ENT._Subscribers s ON s.SubscriberID = c.SubscriberID
WHERE c.EventDate > GETDATE() - 14
ORDER BY c.EventDate

* Non-enterprise accounts must remove the ENT prefix from the join on the _Subscribers data view.

When designing Pivot Tables or query activities, remember to focus on complaint rates per domain or provider, as not all providers offer a FBL mechanism. Standard reports apply this concept by calculating complaints during a period against their associated sends — see Spam Complaint Bucketing.

Handling Spam Complaints

Once aware of complaints, review our resources for addressing deliverability concerns. Audience management is not just at the heart of many complaint problems, but a core pillar of deliverability best practices. Ensure that you’re reaching subscribers that want to be contacted.

Opt-In Best Practices
Email Deliverability Best Practices for Email Studio
Email Deliverability Essentials Trailhead
Marketing Cloud Deliverability Options