Automation analytics - Help Center

A campaign is judged once. An automation runs quietly for months, so what matters isn't how one email performed — it's whether the flow as a whole is still moving people towards something. That's what the Analytics tab is for.

Open any automation and switch the right-hand panel to Analytics.

The numbers on the panel

At the top:

Completed — contacts who have finished the flow.
In progress — contacts currently moving through it, waiting on the next step.
Revenue earned — revenue attributed to this automation's emails, shown once there's some to report. Any automation can earn it, not just ecommerce ones. See How revenue attribution works.
Avg opens and Avg clicks — engagement across every email the flow has sent, as a share of what was delivered.
Conversion rate — the headline number, once you've set a goal. See below.

Under "Overall":

Emails in automation — how many email steps the flow contains.
Total emails sent — how many it has sent in its lifetime.
Date last run — the last time a contact triggered it. A date that's older than you'd expect is usually the first sign that a trigger has quietly stopped firing.
Date created.

You'll also see these summarised on the automations list, so you can compare flows at a glance without opening each one.

Goals and your conversion rate

Opens and clicks tell you an email was interesting. A goal tells you it worked.

A goal is the outcome you actually want: made a purchase, joined the customers audience, booked a call, upgraded. Set one and Audienceful gives you a real conversion rate — the share of everyone who entered the automation who went on to reach it.

Setting a goal

Goals live on the Goals tab of the same panel. Pause the automation to edit them — the fields are locked while it's running so the numbers can't shift underneath contacts who are mid-flow.

Click Add goal and build the condition with the same builder you use for audiences: any contact field or custom field, email activity, publication subscription, Shopify purchase or cart behaviour, or total spend from a connected store.

You can add several goals. They're treated as alternatives — reaching any of them counts as a conversion. That's useful when "success" has more than one shape ("bought a plan or booked a demo").

When you save goals on a paused automation, Audienceful re-checks everyone still inside the attribution window, so your conversion rate reflects the new goal immediately rather than only counting people from here on.

Two settings worth understanding

Complete the automation when a goal is reached (on by default, and recommended). When a contact converts, they exit the flow. Someone who has already bought stops receiving the emails nudging them to buy — which is usually the single biggest quality win in a sequence.

Attribution window (30 days by default). Only a goal reached within this many days of the contact entering the automation counts as a conversion.

The window keeps the number honest. Without it, a welcome sequence would eventually take credit for every purchase a customer ever made. Match it to how long your flow could plausibly be the reason someone acted: a few days for an abandoned-cart nudge, a month or more for a long onboarding sequence.

Conversions are checked in real time — as soon as a contact's data changes to satisfy a goal, they're counted.

Reading the conversion rate

It's contacts who converted ÷ contacts who entered. Two consequences worth keeping in mind:

People still working through the flow are already in the denominator, so a young automation looks worse than it is. Give it at least one full attribution window before you judge it.
If you change the goal or the window, the rate changes — it's a measurement of your definition of success, not a universal constant. Compare a flow against its own history, and against other flows measured the same way.

Finding the email that's losing people

The panel's Email reports section lists every email in the flow. Click one to open its Event Explorer — every open, click, bounce and unsubscribe for that specific step, filterable and exportable as a CSV.

That's where sequence diagnosis actually happens. Working through the emails in order usually shows you one of three things:

Engagement falls off a cliff at one email. Either it arrives too soon after the last one, or its subject line isn't earning the open. Check the delay before it first.
Unsubscribes cluster on one email. That email is asking for too much, too early. Move it later or soften it.
Everything looks healthy but conversions don't come. The emails are fine; the offer or the landing page is the problem. Filter to Clicked and see whether people who reached your page did anything afterwards.

For a broader read on what's a good number and what's noise, see Understanding your email analytics.

Automations vs campaigns

Automation numbers behave differently from campaign reports, and it trips people up:

There's no single send date. Each contact starts the flow whenever they trigger it, so an automation's stats accumulate continuously rather than spiking and settling.
Rates are lifetime, not "this week". Avg opens and avg clicks cover everything the flow has ever sent. A change you make today moves them slowly.
Small automations are noisy. A flow with 40 entrants and 3 conversions is a 7.5% conversion rate, but one more conversion moves it to 10%. Don't over-read early numbers.
Automations usually beat campaigns. They're timely and relevant by construction, so hold them to a higher standard than your newsletter.

Questions about a specific flow's numbers? Email support@audienceful.com — we're happy to look at it with you.