Why measuring a WhatsApp campaign matters so much, and is so easily underestimated

You have a good idea. You work it out, the messages are right, the buttons are in the right place, and in your head it runs. Measuring feels like something for later.

Once live, a few things turn out to go slightly differently. Someone does not press the button but types a reply straight away. Someone opens the form, but does not finish it. Replies come at moments you did not expect, and sometimes they are very different replies from what you had in mind.

None of that is a mistake. It is exactly the information you need to make the campaign better. But it is only useful if you see it, and if you see it per step.

There are many WhatsApp tools, and most of them show the same thing: sent, delivered, read. Those statuses come straight from WhatsApp.

They are just coarse. Usually you get them over the whole campaign, or over all your campaigns together. A read rate over the whole campaign does not say which message in the sequence works and which does not. It does not say which button people press. And it says nothing about what you actually wanted: a reply, a completed form, an appointment.

What we often hear from companies already using a tool is that they do not quite get the information they need for their campaign. Not because the tool is bad, but because the tool does not know what your campaign was supposed to produce.

As soon as you want to adjust, you want to know the following. Up front it looks like detail. During the campaign it is the only thing that counts.

A WhatsApp Flow is a form that opens inside WhatsApp itself. A customer fills in a few fields, sees a calculation and sends it back, without leaving the app. For a campaign, that is where most of the information sits.

By default, all you see of such a form is whether it was completed. Anyone who opens it and stops halfway is invisible. Then you do not know whether people found the calculator uninteresting, or got stuck in it.

Because we build the campaign to order, we could set up the form slightly differently for one client. As soon as someone opens the form, WhatsApp sends a request to our server to fill the first screen, and we record that request as the open. With that, we saw the difference between people who did not tap the calculator and people who opened it but did not finish. The first is a problem with the message. The second is a problem with the form. Without that split, you would have had to guess what to change.

Which statistic makes the difference for you, nobody knows for certain in advance, and neither do we. So we build the measurement as part of the campaign, not as a separate tool bolted on afterwards.

You get a dashboard, and the people who build that dashboard work on it with you. At the start we write down what we track and what counts as a result. Once the campaign runs and shows what is still missing, we adjust. The statistic that matters to you and not to another company, we add in consultation, and that falls under the monthly fee.

An example. At one client, appointments also came about by phone, after someone had asked a question over WhatsApp. We counted those, recording where the appointment came from: via the button, after a question, or by phone. For that client, that was the number that counted. For a webshop it is a different number.

A number you cannot check is not a number. Every figure in the dashboard shows the messages it is built from: which number, which text, when sent, delivered and read, and what followed.

A read rate is always a floor, because anyone with read receipts switched off reads without you seeing it. How that works, and what we measured on a real campaign, is on the open-rate page.