Categories vs. Clear Arguments: Benefits and Limitations

You’ve created your Twilio SendGrid account, authenticated your domain, added a dedicated IP address, and started sending. Now you are wondering how you get into analyzing your E-mail events a little further and read the story behind the numbers.

As an onboarding engineer on the Twilio SendGrid team, I’ve spoken to hundreds of customers who know the metrics they want to track but don’t know exactly how to use the tools available in Twilio SendGrid.

In this article, I’ll cover how to organize your email analytics using categories and clear arguments, as well as the benefits and limitations of these tools.

Prepare your email details

Before you start making clear arguments and category tracking, it is important to decide how you will organize your data and what metrics to rely on. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Segment your target audience

Different types of email offer very different metrics in terms of performance. So decide how you want it segment your audience is the first step in determining which tools to use in SendGrid.

Do you send marketing or transactional emails? Do you send a lot of emails for an upcoming trade show? Is this a lead generation webinar?

It is important to determine your target audience from both a content and an analytical point of view. For example, you might want to segment your webinar emails from the flood of 100,000 welcome emails that have just been delivered.

Determine your preferred email metrics

Before you can break up and roll the data with clear arguments and categories, you need to decide what a successful email campaign will look like. Are you looking at the open rate or the click rate? Do you take the delivery rate into account?

If you haven’t yet decided which metrics you want to evaluate for performance, please refer to this resource Email metrics helps you learn about what customers are usually looking for (likes, openings, clicks, blocks, etc.).

Categories vs. clear arguments

Now that you’ve got your email data ready, let’s see how you can explore the details of your email analytics.

The Twilio SendGrid and Event webhook allow you to track the performance of your campaigns using Categories and unique arguments. A common question we get from customers is: “What is the difference between a category and a clear argument?”

While the two are similar in terms of functionality, categories and unique (also known as custom arguments) have specific use cases for keeping track of your email lists.

To help you decide which tracking tool is right for your program, ask yourself the following questions:

ask
Categories
Clear arguments

Do you use Marketing campaigns, Email API, or both?
More suitable for marketing campaigns
More suitable for email API

Do you track the performance of each campaign or do you track individual recipients?
Tracks campaign performance
Tracks individual recipients

Are you tracking your data externally or are you using the Twilio SendGrid user interface?
Uses the Twilio SendGrid user interface
Provide external tracking through the event webhook

Tracking of data with categories

You can use Categories to analyze your different campaigns but know that there are limitations. Use categories to determine how, for example, your webinar emails compare to your upcoming trade show.

Too many categories can slow down your Twilio SendGrid user interface, so there is one Limit of 100 categories per user. Once created, they cannot be deleted. Therefore, be strategic when setting your email segmentation.

Categories have a daily usage limit of 100 / day per user (1000 / day for paid accounts).

Use case

• Imagine that your company is facing a major event (conference, lead generation, etc.) in a few months. Your sales or marketing team is ready to send a batch campaign to thousands of recipients, but you want to track the performance metrics of those campaigns.

Services

• Categories allow you to keep track of things like marketing messages versus transactional messages in the same batch.
• Twilio SendGrid has categorical dashboards that are immediately available to you so that aggregated statistics specific to categories can be easily analyzed at a high level.
• You can use this information to browse different types of categories and view the statistics associated with that category only.

limitations

• Categories have a daily usage limit of 100 / day per user (1000 / day for paid accounts).
• This limitation is in place to give you the best experience using Twilio SendGrid because too many categories will slow down the user interface.

Tracking of data with clear arguments

Use unique arguments to track individual recipients or to analyze data externally.

Compared to categories, clear arguments are limitless.

If you are primarily using the email API, these are better suited, as using categories can add up quickly.

Use case

• You intend to use the Twilio SendGrid event webhook to process open, click, and spam reporting data. You must pass an argument that the email is “test” or “production”. You want to pass an argument that filters on production-only events.

Services

• Compared to categories, clear arguments are limitless.
• Clear arguments are beneficial when data needs to be traced at a more detailed level.
• You can provide a key-value pair attached to the recipient (example: customer ID: 4567). In this way, you can adjust your tracking parameters per recipient as you wish.

limitations

• Unfortunately, you cannot get unique argument information from within the user interface.
• As mentioned in the use case, the event webhook is the best tool for external tracking. This requires more development work on your part.

Summary: categories and clear arguments

To recap, categories are better at showing overall campaign performance, while unique arguments are great for tracking individual recipient engagement.

Whether you use categories, unique arguments, or both depends on your use case. If you’re unsure of what to track, go back to basics and evaluate how to segment your campaigns and your flags for a successful campaign.

To understand how your email campaigns work, Twilio SendGrid has a great one Overview of statistics contains details on how to use your email. Please contact our Support team or check this out Categories Documents Articles for more questions about setting up these features for your email project.