Broadcast Delivery Stats, Per-Recipient Status & CSV Export

A broadcast delivery report is the per-recipient record of what happened to every message in a campaign — whether WhatsApp accepted it, whether it reached the handset, whether it was marked as read, and if it failed, why. ConvoFly builds one automatically for every broadcast, refreshes it every 5 seconds while the campaign is running, and lets you download the whole thing as a CSV file.

The single most important thing to understand about this report is that the four statuses do not mean what their everyday English names suggest. In particular, "read" systematically undercounts, because any WhatsApp user can switch read receipts off in their own privacy settings — and when they do, a message they genuinely read still only ever reports as "delivered". Read is a floor, never a total, and it is the wrong number to divide anything by.

This guide explains each status precisely, the six failure reasons ConvoFly groups errors into, how to see and export the per-recipient list, and how to turn the report into your next campaign.

What each status means — and what it does not

This table is the heart of the article. The right-hand column is the one that prevents bad decisions.

Why the read count is not a reliable denominator

Every WhatsApp user can turn read receipts off in the app's own privacy settings. It is a normal, widely used consumer feature, not an edge case — and it is entirely outside your control and ConvoFly's. When it is off, the recipient's phone simply never sends the "read" signal back, so the message stays at delivered forever, however carefully the person reads it. see WhatsApp's privacy settings guide

Three consequences follow, and they are the difference between a report you can act on and one that quietly misleads you:

• Your read rate is a floor, not a measurement. If 940 messages were delivered and 520 show as read, the true number of people who read it is at least 520 and unknowably higher. Reporting "55% read rate" as a fact overstates your certainty.
• Never divide by read. Calculating a click rate or reply rate against reads inflates it by exactly the amount that read receipts are switched off in your audience — a figure you cannot know. Divide by delivered, which is measured consistently for everyone.
• Do not compare read rates across audiences. Two campaigns to different countries or age groups can show very different read rates purely because privacy-setting habits differ, with no difference in actual attention.

The same caveat applies wherever "read" appears elsewhere in ConvoFly, including the Didn't read option in Re-target. That audience will always contain people who did read your message but keep receipts off, so write the follow-up so it does no harm if they already saw the first one.

The numbers on the broadcast page

Open Broadcasts and click a campaign. Across the top you get a row of stat cards: Read, Delivered, Sent, Clicked, Replied, Failed, Sending, Queued and Skipped.

Two of them are commonly misread. Clicked only ever has a value if the campaign was set up with click tracking enabled — otherwise it sits at zero regardless of what customers actually did, and it is not part of the delivery funnel. Replied is likewise orthogonal to delivery: the same person can be counted in both Read and Replied, so the cards do not sum to your recipient total.

Underneath, a progress bar splits the campaign into read, delivered, sent, failed and pending, where pending is queued plus sending. While the broadcast is live the page says "live · refreshing every 5s" and updates itself; once the campaign reaches done or cancelled the polling stops and the final figures stand.

Why messages fail: the six buckets

Under the heading "Why messages failed", ConvoFly groups WhatsApp's raw error codes into six plain-English categories, so you can see at a glance whether the problem is your list, your template or your timing.

The first two are permanent and the rest are usually temporary. That distinction drives the retry behaviour described below, and it is also why a rising Not on WhatsApp count is a list-hygiene problem rather than a technical one.

How to see every individual recipient

1. Open Broadcasts and click the campaign you want to inspect.
2. Click View recipients.
3. Use the tabs across the top — All, Sent, Failed, Queued, Skipped — to narrow the list.
4. Read across the columns: Phone, Status, Delivery, Reason, Tries, Sent and Replied. The Reason column shows the category plus the raw error text from WhatsApp, which is where you look when the category says "Other".

One practical limit: this on-screen table shows up to 2,000 rows. For a campaign larger than that, use the CSV export, which has no row limit.

Exporting the full report to CSV

1. Open the broadcast, or its recipients page.
2. Click Export CSV.
3. Open the downloaded file in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.

The file has 8 columns: phone, status, delivery_status, failure_reason, error, attempts, sent_at and replied_at. Note what is not there: there is no clicks column, so the CSV is a delivery record rather than a full engagement record.

Two useful things to do with it. Sort by failure_reason and count the rows marked not-on-WhatsApp or invalid — those are numbers to correct or delete in whatever system your contacts come from, and every campaign you send to them is wasted work. Then filter to rows with a value in replied_at: that is your engaged list, and it is worth keeping outside ConvoFly as a record of who actually talks to you.

Exporting is restricted to admin users, so if you cannot see the button, ask whoever administers your account.

Retrying the failures worth retrying

When a campaign finishes with failures, the detail page offers ↻ Retry failed, with the count of eligible messages shown in the button itself. Clicking it asks you to confirm: "Re-queue recoverable failures for another attempt? Numbers not on WhatsApp / invalid are skipped automatically."

That exclusion is the important part. Retrying a number that is not on WhatsApp achieves nothing and repeatedly sending to bad numbers is exactly the behaviour that damages a sender's standing, so ConvoFly refuses on your behalf. Meta ties your ability to grow your messaging limit to sending high-quality messages across your numbers and templates (Meta, WhatsApp messaging limits), which makes list hygiene a growth issue rather than a tidiness one.

The same page also has ⏸ Pause, ▶ Resume, ✕ Cancel and Duplicate. Cancelling warns that unsent recipients will be skipped — useful if you spot a mistake in a long-running send rather than watching it finish.

What failures cost you

Nothing, directly. Under Meta's per-message pricing, in force since 1 July 2025, "You are only charged when a template message is delivered" (Meta, WhatsApp pricing). A failed message is not billed, and neither is a skipped one. Rates differ by country and Meta publishes them in downloadable rate cards rather than on the page itself, so check there for your own market.

The real cost of failures is reputational rather than financial: they signal a list that has not been maintained, and that is what eventually shows up as a quality problem. See managing opt-outs, frequency and quality for the controls that keep this in check.

What a healthy report looks like

• Delivered close to sent. A gap of a few percent is normal; 20% is a list problem. Compare the two cards directly.
• Failures concentrated in one bucket. Scattered failures across all six categories usually means a template or account issue; a single tall bucket is a specific, fixable cause.
• Replies present at all. A campaign with 0 replies from 1,000 delivered messages has an offer problem, and no amount of list work will fix it.
• Read treated as a floor. If you are reporting a read rate to anyone, say "at least" in front of it.
• Rising failures over successive campaigns. The clearest early warning you have. Audit opt-in and list source before it affects your quality rating.

Turning the report into your next campaign

The report is not just a record — it is the audience picker for your follow-up. Rather than exporting a CSV and re-uploading a filtered version, use Re-target, which reads these same outcomes directly: pick the past broadcast, then choose Replied, Didn't reply, Didn't read, Wasn't delivered or Failed to send.

A sensible default rhythm is to send the campaign, wait 24 to 48 hours for statuses and replies to settle, then read the report once and build exactly one follow-up from it. Reading it obsessively in the first hour tells you little, because a large list is still working through the queue and the read counts lag behind reality by design.