How Campaign Stats Are Calculated
The three core metrics in your Campaigns dashboard are open rate, reply rate, and bounce rate. Each measures something different. Knowing how they are calculated helps you benchmark accurately and avoid drawing the wrong conclusions from the numbers.
Open Rate
Definition: The percentage of delivered emails where the recipient opened the email.
Formula: (Unique Opens / Delivered Emails) x 100
Where it shows: Campaigns page -> expand your campaign card -> Open Rate column.
What counts as a unique open: One open per email per recipient. If the same person opens the same email five times, it counts once. This prevents inflated numbers from aggressive re-openers.
Benchmark: 40%+ is elite for cold outbound. 20-40% is solid. Below 20% suggests deliverability issues, as emails may be landing in spam where they never get seen.
Important caveat: Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP): Since Apple introduced MPP, open tracking is less reliable than it used to be. Apple Mail pre-fetches tracking pixels on behalf of users, which means an "open" gets recorded even if the person never actually read the email. This inflates open rates for any list with a significant percentage of Apple Mail users.
Treat open rate as a directional signal rather than a precise measurement. If your open rate drops sharply, that is a real signal. If it is high, take it with some skepticism, as some of those opens may be Apple pre-fetches rather than human reads.
What drives open rate: Subject lines and preview text are the primary levers. Infrastructure Health (inbox placement) is the other factor. An email that goes to spam cannot be opened.
Reply Rate
Definition: The percentage of sent emails that received any reply (positive, negative, or neutral).
Formula: (Replies / Sent Emails) x 100
What counts as a reply: Any response from the recipient. This includes interested replies ("let's talk"), negative replies ("not interested"), out-of-office replies, and referrals ("talk to my colleague instead"). All responses count.
Benchmark: 5%+ is elite. 3-5% is strong and above industry average. 2-3% is acceptable for highly competitive or niche markets. Below 2% consistently is a signal that something is off, whether in targeting, copy, or deliverability.
Why reply rate matters most: Reply rate is the single most important metric in cold email. Unlike open rate, it cannot be faked by a pixel pre-fetch. A reply is a real human making a deliberate decision to respond. It measures actual engagement, not just inbox placement or subject line curiosity.
How Piqely uses reply rate: Wire (our AI messaging agent) tracks reply rates by sequence step, angle, and ICP segment. When a particular angle consistently generates replies above 3%, we run it harder. When something underperforms for two or three send cycles, we pull it and replace it. The reply rate trend in your campaign data reflects this iterative process.
What positive reply rate looks like: For context, most cold email campaigns average 1-2% reply rates. If your campaign is running at 3%+, it is outperforming the majority of outbound in market.
Bounce Rate
Definition: The percentage of sent emails that were undeliverable (the server could not deliver the email to the recipient's inbox).
Formula: (Bounces / Sent Emails) x 100
Two types of bounces:
- Hard bounces: The email address does not exist, the domain does not exist, or the recipient's server permanently rejected the email. These contacts are removed from your list immediately.
- Soft bounces: Temporary delivery failure due to a full inbox, server temporarily down, or message size too large. Soft bounces are retried automatically before being counted.
- Send volume over time (bar chart)
- Open rate, reply rate, and bounce rate with color-coded benchmark indicators (green = above benchmark, yellow = within range, red = below benchmark)
- A breakdown by sequence step showing which steps generate the most replies
Threshold: Piqely targets under 3% bounce rate across all active campaigns. If a campaign hits 5% or above, it is paused for list review. High bounce rates damage sending domain reputation, and a reputation hit is harder to recover from than a paused campaign.
What causes high bounce rates: The most common cause is list quality. If your prospect list contains old or invalid emails (people who left a company, domains that shut down, or emails that were never valid), bounces climb. Piqely runs all prospect lists through Millionverifier before sending to catch invalid addresses up front.
Your data: In the Campaigns page, bounce rate is visible on your expanded campaign card. If you see a bounce rate climbing above 2%, flag it to your CSM so we can review the list source.
Spam Complaint Rate
This metric does not appear prominently on the dashboard but it is tracked internally. Spam complaints happen when a recipient clicks "Mark as Spam" in their email client. A complaint rate above 0.1% is a serious signal, as Gmail and Outlook both use this threshold to identify senders worth penalizing.
Piqely's spam complaint rate across campaigns stays well below this threshold, but it is worth knowing what it means if your CSM ever raises it.
Where to View Your Stats
In your portal, go to Campaigns in the left sidebar. Find your active campaign and click to expand the card. You will see:
A Note on Stat Delays
Stats refresh every few hours, not in real time. If you sent a batch yesterday and the numbers look lower than expected, check back the following morning. Reply and open data can take 12-24 hours to fully populate after a send cycle.