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SMS campaigns cut through the noise with staggering 98% open rates. But it’s not enough for your audience to simply open your message. You need to drive conversions, too. And to do that, you need to collect the right SMS marketing analytics to optimize your texts into powerful conversion tools.
Most marketers only monitor basic delivery stats, missing the whole picture. Complete analytics reveal crucial patterns and opportunities for improvement.
This guide covers 9 essential SMS campaign metrics to track. Use these metrics to understand your audience better and improve campaign performance.
1. Delivery rate
Delivery rate measures the percentage of messages successfully delivered to your audience. This metric forms the foundation of SMS analytics because all other insights depend on whether subscribers actually receive your messages.
Tracking delivery rate also helps you identify quality concerns. If your delivery rate is low, it might indicate issues with your subscriber list, message content, or SMS message links. The industry benchmark for delivery rate is above 97%, so try not to dip below that percentage.
Improve delivery rate by following proper list hygiene practices, such as:
- Only sending to opted-in recipients
- Sticking to character limits
- Using branded links in your SMS messages to prevent being blocked as spam
- Using a trusted SMS marketing platform to send messages
Sender reputation management is a big deal because links and messages can easily end up on blocklists if even a few recipients mark them as suspicious.
2. Open rate
Open rate measures the percentage of delivered messages that subscribers actually opened. This baseline metric shows initial engagement with your content.
While you may track open rates in email campaigns, SMS open rates are significantly higher – 98%- compared to just 20-30% for email. Track open rates to help improve deliverability.
If your SMS open rates suddenly drop, consider these potential problems:
- Audience fatigue: SMS marketing popularity means subscribers receive more messages than before. This affects overall SMS customer engagement. Send only relevant content at consistent, expected times.
- SMS carrier filtering: Sender reputation and link quality affect how carriers handle your messages. Send only to opt-in subscribers and always provide clear opt-out options.
- Lack of personalization: Your content must stand out on SMS like any other channel. Use analytics to understand your audience, create segments based on common characteristics, and build more engaging SMS marketing campaigns.
Tracking these fluctuations and making small adjustments can positively impact your overall SMS open rates.
3. Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of subscribers who click links within your messages. This metric directly indicates audience engagement and interest. Tracking CTR is the most important step in optimizing campaign content in your SMS analytics.
Using branded links, customized with your company’s URL, in your messages clearly shows recipients who sent the message. Your brand stays front and center with every communication.
Creating custom back-half text also helps recipients clearly understand the value they’ll receive after they click, which is a great way to boost CTR.
Conversely, generic links with random back halves can raise suspicion among your audience- after all, SMS is a prevalent phishing and spam tool. Make sure your links look trustworthy.
Rebrandly Analytics also provides detailed click data, including total clicks, geographic reports, and when recipients click on links throughout the day. This information is essential for personalizing campaigns and getting messages to your audience at the optimal time for engagement.
4. Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of subscribers who complete a desired action after clicking a link in your SMS message. This could include signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or creating an account. When building your SMS analytics infrastructure, this metric directly ties your marketing efforts to specific business outcomes.
Tracking conversions is easier when you use UTM parameters to define specific channels for attribution. Rebrandly’s UTM parameter tool helps you create these trackable shortcodes for your referral traffic so you can see the journey from any SMS marketing message to your desired actions.
5. Opt-out rate
Opt-out rate measures the percentage of SMS recipients who unsubscribe after receiving a message from one of your campaigns. This metric helps you track both individual message relevance and overall list health.
Your SMS analytics benchmarks should aim for under 3% opt-out rates per campaign, which is the standard rate for this channel.
While it is an SMS marketing best practice to include the option to opt out of receiving messages for every campaign you create, sudden spikes in opt-out rates for a specific SMS campaign or message can indicate a problem. You should immediately assess the situation and make changes. The issue will likely be related to your message content or audience fatigue, but larger spikes could indicate a problem with your domain reputation, so check.
6. Response rate
Response rate measures the percentage of subscribers who reply to one of your SMS marketing messages. This metric shows overall engagement levels among your subscribers and helps you track two-way communication potential within your audience. While not every campaign will require responses, this is a great metric to include in your SMS marketing analytics dashboard for more conversational marketing campaigns.
SMS response rate is also helpful when using the channel for custom support. You can improve your response rates by using clear calls to action that communicate exactly what the next steps a recipient needs to take to move forward and by personalizing the messages with content relevant to their request.
As you develop these campaigns, consider what elements, like name and location, you can include in your messages to create a sense of urgency for their response.
7. Link engagement analytics
LInk engagement analytics reveal audience and behavioral data about the users who click on your SMS links. These metrics can help you identify who is clicking, where, and when, so you can further optimize your SMS campaigns.
Rebrandly helps you track the following information about SMS links clicked in your campaigns:
- Geographic data
- Language data
- Device information
- Timing insights
Together, you can use these insights to optimize your SMS links with dynamic traffic routing to custom landing pages that are device-optimized and translated into the correct language for each recipient.
You can also collect insights on the top days and most popular hours for interacting with tests, to create an SMS sending schedule that aligns with your audience’s needs.
8. Cost per conversion (CPA)
Cost per conversion (also called cost per action or cost per acquisition) measures the total campaign cost divided by the number of conversions. This metric helps determine the overall ROI of your SMS campaigns and shows how efficiently your team uses marketing budget and resources.
To calculate CPA, look at messaging costs, link management, and other integration platform fees. Once you have this baseline calculation, divide that overall cost per campaign by your conversion rates to see how much those actions cost your business.
Optimizing CPA is more involved than other SMS marketing analytics because you need to create A/B tests that take time to run. The standard time for each test is approximately two weeks. By discovering exactly what landing page content resonates with your audience the most, you can slowly improve conversion rates and CPA over time.
9. Campaign comparison metrics
SMS campaign comparison metrics measure performance differences between multiple SMS campaigns. These SMS marketing analytics help you determine the most effective strategies and the type of message content your audience engages with most. Think of this as a more high-level, strategic view of your SMS marketing campaign design.
Rebrandly helps you create these comparisons with features like campaign tagging and comparative analytics. You can build dashboards that showcase different campaigns within your SMS marketing efforts and identify what types of campaigns, whether promotional, transactional, or conversational, perform best overall.
When you consistently use UTM parameter tracking across campaigns, it’s easy to find the content, timing, and calls to action that lead to campaign success. As you build out more campaigns, you can leverage these metrics to refine your SMS marketing strategy and build more effective campaigns.
SMS marketing analytics is the key to successful campaigns
SMS marketing is one of your most powerful tools for real-time engagement—but only when you have data to back your strategy. Tracking delivery, engagement, and conversion metrics helps you optimize performance and demonstrate impact.
Combining message-level engagement stats with robust link analytics connects message delivery to business outcomes. Platforms like Rebrandly make it easier to shorten, brand, and track links across all SMS campaigns, unlocking deeper insights and higher returns.
To see how Rebrandly’s analytics can help optimize your next SMS marketing campaign, start a free trial.