Members report overview
The Reports > Members page givea a count of members by domain, and for major domains. Knowing that a large portion of your mailing is going to a particular domain may help you tailor your message for those recipients, or explain why mailings are slow to close out if a particular domain is having trouble that day.
Mail Formats show you a member's formatting preferences. For example, text, HTML, or AOL and whether a member has HTML reading capability. In order to have statistics about opens, you must set Track Opens to Yes in Mailings > New Mailing > Tracking.
Member counts are displayed in two ways: as tables, or as charts.
Most tables may be downloaded as CSV files, which may then be opened using applications such as Excel.
The reports are grouped as follows in the table below:
| Field Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Subscriber Activity |
This shows a table of subscription information about your list. |
| Attribute Reports |
This shows charts about member attributes that affect how or whether they are receiving your mailings. |
| All Lists Member Count |
This shows a chart of the distribution of members across all of your lists. |
| Domain Reports |
This shows charts about how your membership is distributed across different domains. |
| Demographic Reports |
This shows charts about demographic values that you have inserted into your members table. |
| Over-Time Reports |
It shows subscription information about your list over time. |
Statistical Integrity of Member Counts
It is important to keep in mind that the integrity of the statistics reported by Aurea List Manager is highly dependent on two things:
- Your list and server settings,
- Administrator activity.
The aggressiveness of your purge settings can have an impact on the data reported. For example a weekly mailing list where members are put on hold after two permanent failures, and are never notified of their hold status. The configuration also has a Purge Held setting of five days and Member Counts to once a week.
With this configuration in mind, it is conceivable that after a mailing, some percentage of members are put on hold. Five days later, they are purged. This all happens between the times you look at reports. In other words, many members have moved from normal status to held status, and have then been deleted. Thus, these purged members are not new held members nor are they new unsubscribed members when the next report is run, that is, they have effectively disappeared. This creates an effect that the numbers from week to week do not add up, which can be misleading.
This situation may be remedied by having less aggressive purge settings. Specifically, the purge held setting should be increased to something greater than the report frequency. For example, for weekly reports, it is advisable to increase the Purge held setting to something greater than seven days, thereby preventing members from being put on hold and subsequently deleted prior to the next time you view reports.)
Another situation that leads to the numbers appearing to not add up is administrator activity. Specifically, if an administrator deletes members either using the web interface or via email commands, those members have moved from normal status to a status that is not monitored by the reporting (deleted). In both cases, the illusion is that normal members have disappeared. This has to be considered when analyzing your figures.