Posted On: Nov 2, 2016
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now enables you to track your bounce, complaint, sent, and rejected email metrics with fine-grained granularity. Previously, Amazon SES provided your email sending metrics at an AWS account level. Now, you can access your metrics based on characteristics you define. For example, you can track metrics for a particular email campaign, a particular subset of recipients, or whatever aspect of email sending is important to your business operations and analytics. You can choose to publish the metrics to either Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Kinesis Firehose.
To set up fine-grained email sending metrics, you first define email characteristics by creating a configuration set. When you create a configuration set, you specify where to publish the email sending metrics (Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Kinesis Firehose), along with some additional information required by the publishing destination. Then, each time you send an email, you provide the name of the configuration set, tag names, and tag values to apply to the email. Depending on which email sending interface you use, you either provide the tags to Amazon SES as name/value pairs in the API call, or as email headers in the email. As examples of name/value pairs, you could use campaign/book, genre/sci-fi, and generation/millennial when you send an email that advertises science fiction books to your millennial customers.
You can define your tags and use your email sending metrics for any purpose that helps your business operations and analytics. As an operational metric example, you might publish your email sending metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, and set up an alarm in Amazon CloudWatch to notify you when the complaint rate of your book campaign exceeds 5%. As an example of analytics, you could tag your emails with both a campaign ID and a customer ID, and set up Amazon Kinesis Firehose to stream your email sending metrics to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. You could then use an analytics platform like Kibana to compute the campaign’s email engagement metric (for example, the number of customers who purchased the advertised book) in near-real-time.
Even if you don’t want to define your own tags, you can still take advantage of the additional metric granularity because Amazon SES automatically adds auto-tags for you. These auto-tags are the configuration set name, the domain of the “From” address, the caller’s outgoing IP address, Amazon SES’s outgoing IP address, and the caller’s IAM identity.
To get started with Amazon SES email sending metrics, go to the Amazon SES console and create a configuration set, or read further details in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.
