What are sends?

Sends count the messages a campaign or flow handed to the messaging platform — every email or SMS dispatched, before bounces and rejections take their toll. Deliveries, tracked separately, count what actually arrived in an inbox or on a phone. The gap between the two is your bounce layer, and it is worth watching in its own right.

Formula

sends = messages dispatched   (deliveries = sends − bounces/rejections)

Worked example

A campaign sends 50,000 emails; 48,500 deliver. The 3% gap is bounces — dead addresses, full mailboxes, rejecting servers. Open rate and click rate divide by the 48,500 (a message nobody received can't be opened), while unsubscribe rate divides by the 50,000. A growing send–delivery gap on a stable list usually means list decay or a sender-reputation problem brewing.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

fact_messaging_performance stores one row per campaign or flow message per send timestamp, with the platform-reported sends and deliveries alongside opens, clicks and unsubscribes. v_messaging_performance serves the per-row figures; the flow views sum them per automation and per step. Sends is also the denominator of the per-message money figures — cost per message, revenue per message and net margin per message all divide by it, so the volume number and the unit economics always refer to the same messages.

Why it matters

Send volume is the messaging channel's spend equivalent: it is what you scale up or down, what SMS bills by (via segments), and what every per-message rate normalizes against. Revenue comparisons between campaigns mean little until they are read per send — a campaign that earned twice as much on five times the sends is the worse performer.

Common mistakes

• Dividing opens or clicks by sends. Those rates use deliveries; using sends understates them by exactly your bounce rate.
• Growing sends into a decaying list. More sends to disengaged recipients raises unsubscribe volume and hurts deliverability, which then taxes every future campaign.
• Comparing campaign revenue without normalizing per send. Absolute revenue follows volume; quality shows in revenue and net margin per message.

Where you see this in the app

Marketing → Messaging, as the sends column of the campaign table and in the flow waterfall's step volumes.