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Campaign Analytics and Actions
By the end of this lesson you'll be able to read a running campaign's health, tell the two kinds of bounce apart and know what each one is asking you to fix, and use the two campaign buttons knowing which one you can't take back.
📮 The Campaign We're Reading
The campaign we cover in the video above asks software engineers in San Francisco which restaurant in the city is the most iconic, and gives them a few options to pick from.
The analytics we cover are all downstream of that positioning.
📊 The Funnel and the Step Conversion
Open the Analytics tab. The top of the page is the lead funnel: how many leads were processed, how many got enrolled into the campaign, and how many have completed the sequence.
Below that is sequence conversion, broken out step by step. This is how you find out whether your follow-ups are doing anything at all.
On this campaign the read is:
- About 15,000 leads got the first message, and 81 of them replied
- The follow-ups sent about 7,300 emails and got 28 replies
Those are this campaign's numbers on this list, not a benchmark to hold yourself to. What you're looking for in your own is the shape: if step one gets replies and step two gets nothing, that's a messaging problem.
💬 Replies and Reply Rate
Sequencer categorizes replies automatically into interested, meeting request, information request, and the rest. On this campaign the overall reply rate reads 0.5%, or 109 replies, and a majority of them are still sitting in uncategorized.
That's typical. People write strange things back to cold email, and a lot of it doesn't fit a bucket, especially an email like this one asking which restaurant is the most iconic. Use these categories to triage quickly, not as a system of record.
Then the distinction the rest of your reporting depends on:
The number that matters is your positive reply rate, not your overall reply rate.
A raw reply rate includes out of office messages, wrong-person bounces, and people telling you to go away. Those are all replies. None of them are pipeline. Positive replies are the ones attached to a conversation you actually want, so that's the number to watch week after week.
📉 Two Kinds of Bounce
A recipient bounce rate that's high, say 1% or more, is telling you to go fix your data before you send again.
Sender bounces clustering on one domain mean that domain is wearing out. When you see that, the work is to swap those domains out, or buy new ones and warm them up before you swap. Which is exactly the rented vans problem from earlier in the course: that one is coming back with problems, and it's time to hand it back.
🎯 Thresholds Worth Watching
Two operating signals to keep an eye on:
- Stay above roughly 1% on reply rate
- Stay below roughly 1% on bounce rate
Inside both and you're in reasonable shape.
Treat those as working signals rather than a promise about your results. Where you actually land depends on the quality of your list, the quality of your offer, and your market, and nobody can hand you that number in advance. You need to run it and see.
📋 The Activity Tab
Switch to Activity and you get a per-lead event feed: enrolled into a campaign, sent an email, replied to an email, paused.
Plus, all of it is recorded into Audiences, on the lead's own record.
So if that person becomes an opportunity eight months from now, the cold touch that started it is still in their history. When someone asks how marketing contributed to an enterprise account, you can open that lead's audience record and show the full list of activity rather than reconstructing a theory. The Audiences course in Clay University covers how those records are built.
⏸️ Pause and Complete a Campaign
Pause is your editing tool. Pause, change the copy, resume.
Complete is terminal, and it's the right button when a campaign is genuinely done and you want certainty that nothing else goes out. Just be careful with it, because there's no path back.
🚀 What's Next
You can now read a campaign's health off the funnel and the step conversion, tell a recipient bounce from a sender bounce and know which one to fix upstream, work from positive reply rate instead of raw reply rate, and use Pause and Complete knowing which one is permanent.
Next we'll deal with what happens when somebody writes back: how a reply to an alt-domain inbox reaches the right human on your team.
