Exploring the Email Performance Analytics Liveboard

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The Email Performance Liveboard is the standard Analytics board for email. It gives you interactive filters, drill-down, and Explore for deep analysis of sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, and suppressions. Data stays current to within an hour and is retained for 15 to 27 months, depending on your account.

Who does this: Any Act-On user. Most Explore options require Dynamic Business Analytics or Premium AI Analytics
Time needed: 5 to 15 minutes to explore; longer for deeper analysis
Why this matters: The Email Performance Liveboard is where most email questions are answered. Filters and drill-downs let you compare messages, isolate senders, and trace spikes or dips back to a campaign or a single send, without leaving the page. Knowing the four tabs and the Explore / drill-down pattern unlocks most of what the board can do.
Quick Reference (Advanced Users) - Click to Expand
  • Access: Dynamic/Premium users - Reports > Analytics > Library > Email Performance. Standard users - Reports > Email Performance.
  • Four tabs: Email Performance, Email Clicks, Email Deliverability, True Open Impact.
  • Standard filters: Send date, Message title, Sender, Campaign name, Trigger Name, Segment Name.
  • Explore tile: ellipsis > Explore. Drill down: right-click a data point > choose an attribute.
  • Underlying data: right-click > Show underlying data. Use Edit Columns, then download as CSV.
  • Download a tile as PNG, XLSX, or CSV; download the whole Liveboard as PDF.
Try it like this: Open the Email Performance Liveboard, set Send date to "Last 30 Day(s)", and on the Email Clicks tab right-click the day with the highest click rate. Choose Drill down by Message Subject to see which email drove that spike. Use the back arrow to return to the original view.

Accessing the Email Performance Liveboard

A Liveboard is what you might think of as a dashboard, with live data that's recent to within an hour. The Email Performance Liveboard has four tabs:

  • Email Performance: key stats around sends, deliveries, opens, and clicks.
  • Email Clicks: click data by day and by URL.
  • Email Deliverability: suppressions and failures.
  • True Open Impact: AI identifies opens and clicks generated by security and privacy systems. See True Open in Act-On Analytics.
Email Performance Liveboard with four tabs

Filtering the Liveboard

Filter options are the grey pills at the top. Standard filters include Send date, Message title, Sender, Campaign name, Trigger Name, and Segment Name. Filters combine: a narrow send date range limits which messages can be chosen. Filters apply to every visualisation across the three main tabs.

Campaign Name

Use the Campaign name filter to compare performance at the campaign level. Learn more about campaigns in Creating Campaigns and Generating Campaign Reports.

Trigger Name for Programs, Forms & Webinars

Act-On emails are triggered in different ways. Some are standard or staggered (sent over time). If a message is part of an Automated Program, an automatic Form response, or a webinar (see Creating Triggered Email Messages), it has an associated Trigger Name matching the Program, Form, or webinar.

Apply the Trigger Name filter to narrow to messages associated with a specific Program, Form, or webinar. The "Message Performance by Trigger" chart on the Email Performance tab uses the same attribute.

Message Performance by Trigger chart

Exploring your data

Liveboards give you several options for deeper analysis. Explore is available on any tile and lets you filter or modify the data.

  • At the top right of any tile, click the ellipsis > Explore.

For example, exploring the Opened (Unique) KPI card lets you filter or change the data displayed.

Exploring the Opened Unique KPI card

To filter by sender, type the sender's email.

Filtering by sender email

Or choose Replace to swap the measure. For example, replace Unique opens with Total opens.

Replace a measure inside Explore

Explore gives you access to every email performance field, and the resulting data can be downloaded. Dynamic Business Analytics and Premium AI Analytics users can save changes (ellipsis > Make a copy).

Drill-down

Right-click any data point to open the drill-down menu.

Drill-down menu on a data point

If a specific day shows a high click rate, drill down into the attributes to dig in.

Drill-down attribute options

Choosing Message Subject changes the visualisation to show click rate by message subject. It's then easy to spot that a Webinar registration email drove most of the clicks.

Drill-down result by Message Subject

Use the back arrow to return to the original view.

AI Agent

Dynamic Business Analytics and Premium AI Analytics users have the AI Agent on every tile. See AI Agent in the Act-On Analytics Overview.

Explore underlying data

For any visualisation, view the underlying data by right-clicking and choosing Show underlying data. You get a table. Use Edit Columns to add more data columns, and download as CSV.

Note: Email performance data is aggregated. You see one row per unique message sent, with totals for sent, delivered, opened, and so on. For individual recipient-level data, see the Sent Messages report.

Filter from any visualisation

Right-click any data point to filter the rest of the Liveboard by that data point. For example, click a bubble on a scattergraph (representing one email sent) to filter the rest of the Liveboard to that email.

Filter the Liveboard from a scattergraph bubble

The filter appears at the top of the Liveboard and can be cleared there, or removed by right-clicking the original data point and choosing Clear Filter.

Downloading and presenting

Use the menu at the upper right of any visualisation to download it as a PNG, XLSX, or CSV. Use the menu at the top of the Liveboard to download the whole page as a PDF.

Use the Present function in these menus to display visualisations in slideshow style.

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