Spam Complaints Over Time Report

What Is the Spam Complaints Over Time Report

The Spam Complaints Over Time Report shows the number of spam complaints received from several ISPs. This report is divided into time intervals, with both the send and the complaint bucketed into the period during which the send occurred.

The Spam Complaints Over Time Report contains a graph showing the spam complaint rate for the ISPs over the time period of the account and a table with the following information for each time interval in the report:

The report also contains the thresholds that some of the ISPs use to determine when to block your emails. If your spam complaint rate is greater than the threshold value for the ISP, the ISP may block your email sends.

So why use bucketing? The bucketing process clarifies complaint ratios-especially when displaying data breakdown by Day. For example, suppose that you send an email with 10 subscribers on Tuesday. You receive no complaints about that email on Tuesday. However, you get one complaint on Wednesday and one on Thursday. If you look in the tracking section of the application, you see one complaint recorded for Wednesday and one for Thursday. When you run the report, though, you see the two complaints and 10 sends on Tuesday. This works out to a 20 percent complaint rate because all complaints are bucketed with the sends.

What would happen to the ratios if the sends and complaints fell into different buckets? In this example, you send to 10 subscribers on Tuesday and receive no complaints. This equals a complaint rate of zero percent. But on Wednesday, zero sends and one complaint occur-for a complaint rate of more than 100 percent! Again, on Thursday, a 100+ percent complaint rate is recorded.

By bucketing all the complaints with the sends, you get the more accurate 20 percent complaint rate.

Why Run the Spam Complaints Over Time Report

Run the Spam Complaints Over Time Report to evaluate your success in creating emails that subscribers want to receive. You can also run this report to help determine how clean your mailing list is.

How to Run the Spam Complaints Over Time Report

Use the following steps to run the report:

1. Click the Tracking tab in the navigation bar.
2. Click my reports.
3. Click Tracking Reports.
4. Click Spam Complaints Over Time.
5. Complete the information in the Report Parameters section:

   Start Date	The first date for which information is included in the report.
   End Date	the last date for which information is included in the report.
   Period	The time interval into which the report data is grouped.
   Date Range	This field is available only if you are using a report activity. Valid values include: Custom Date Range Provides fields to specify a static date range. These are the same fields that appear if you are not using a report activity to run the report. Start Date The earliest date for which to include information in the report. End Date The latest date for which to include information in the report. Previous Time Period Provides a field to select the time period over which to run the report. Th e period is relative to when the report runs.
   Exclude Single Sends	Determines whether the report includes information for single sends-a special kind of send that can be initiated only by an API call.
   Time Zone	The timezone in which you wish the results of the report to appear
   Date Format	The format in which dates appear in the report

6. Complete the information in the Report Results Delivery section.
7. Complete the information in the Result File Format section.
8. Complete the information in the Run the Report section.
9. Click Submit.