messaging-performance-analyzer

Messaging performance analyzer

Overview

Use this skill to turn raw Sent message evidence into a concise diagnosis of what changed, where the funnel leaks, and what to fix first. Anchor every analysis to Sent message IDs, message status, message activities, and webhook events before interpreting carrier, WhatsApp, or RCS provider codes.

Sent’s v3 send endpoint accepts a template-based request and returns per-recipient message_id values for asynchronous tracking. Status is retrieved with GET /v3/messages/{id}, and detailed lifecycle evidence is retrieved with GET /v3/messages/{id}/activities. Webhook endpoints support event ingestion, event-type discovery, event history, test delivery, and secret rotation.

When to use

Use this skill when the user asks why messages failed, why delivery or read rate dropped, whether fallback is working, whether a provider is filtering traffic, or how a campaign performed. Trigger on words such as “MDR,” “delivery report,” “webhook event,” “activities,” “status,” “failed,” “undelivered,” “read rate,” “fallback,” “filtering,” “throttling,” or “carrier reject.”

Do not use this skill to register 10DLC, design a Sender Profile, onboard RCS, or author WhatsApp templates. Hand those workflows to the related skills after the performance symptom is isolated.

Evidence hierarchy

Start with Sent-owned evidence, then enrich it with provider context. This prevents overfitting to a carrier code that may be missing, stale, or normalized differently across channels.

Process

1. Pin the question before slicing the funnel

Restate the user’s exact question as a measurable comparison. “WhatsApp is bad” becomes “Did WhatsApp DELIVERED rate fall for order templates sent from profile A between Monday and Wednesday?” A precise question keeps the cohort stable and prevents mixed-channel averages from hiding the failure mode.

Capture these dimensions before calculating anything: profile or sender identity, template ID/name, channel, country, send window, recipient segment, and whether fallback or multi-channel broadcast was requested.

Example. If a user says “RCS fallback stopped working,” define the cohort as sends that omitted channel or used channel: ["sent"], then compare the selected payload.channel and message activities. Analyze any explicit multi-channel arrays separately as broadcasts.

2. Build cohorts from Sent message IDs

Use Sent message_id as the primary unit. A v3 send can create separate messages for each recipient and channel pair when multiple channels are specified. Count each Sent message once in a terminal-outcome rollup, then add recipient-level or campaign-level rollups only after deduplication.

Distinguish an activity history from a latest-status snapshot. A history can prove the transitions it contains. A snapshot such as status=DELIVERED proves only the observed current outcome; it does not prove that the export also observed QUEUED, ROUTED, or SENT. Report unavailable transition denominators as N/A, not zero, and never synthesize missing transitions.

Do not use provider IDs such as WhatsApp wamid, SMS carrier IDs, or RCS message IDs as the primary join key unless the exported evidence lacks Sent IDs. Provider IDs are useful for escalation, but the Sent API and dashboard track status by Sent message ID.

3. Normalize lifecycle stages to Sent’s documented statuses

Use Sent’s documented delivery lifecycle as the first-pass funnel: QUEUED, ROUTED, SENT, and DELIVERED. Treat READ as a separate engagement measure for WhatsApp and RCS, never as an SMS delivery requirement. Keep terminal failures, deferred/in-flight messages, inbound RECEIVED messages, and malformed/unknown records in separate buckets using only fields present in the evidence.

4. Check webhook health before diagnosing delivery

A drop in dashboard activity or customer-side events can be a webhook ingestion problem, not a delivery problem. Confirm webhook existence, active status, event subscriptions, recent event history, and test delivery. Rotate secrets only when the user explicitly asks or when a credential compromise is suspected, because rotation immediately invalidates the old secret.

Example. If Sent status shows DELIVERED but the customer database shows “no delivery callbacks,” inspect /v3/webhooks/{id}/events and the customer’s endpoint logs. If Sent has events but the endpoint returned failures, the fix is webhook handling, not campaign routing.

5. Split by channel before naming a root cause

SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS fail differently. Do not average them together unless the user explicitly asked for a blended KPI. Compare each channel’s funnel and then compare the aggregate.

6. Quantify impact before recommending fixes

Report raw counts and rates together. A 40% failure rate over 15 messages is a different decision than a 4% failure rate over 150,000 messages. Reconcile the global totals with every channel × direction group, retaining explicit unknown groups instead of silently dropping incomplete dimensions. Include exclusions such as pending messages, test traffic, sandbox sends, retries, and duplicate channel fan-out.

A practical analysis table should include: sent count, latest status distribution, failure count, failure-rate delta versus baseline, top exact error strings/codes, first observed timestamp, affected templates, affected countries, and affected profiles.

7. Convert the diagnosis into the next action

End with one primary diagnosis, one confidence level, and the next verification step. Avoid long lists of generic fixes. Tie every recommendation to observed evidence.

Example. “The largest leak is after ROUTED for SMS traffic on profile support-us, starting at 14:10 UTC. WhatsApp and RCS cohorts are stable. The affected traffic uses the same order-update template and a US A2P route. Verify the Sent brand/campaign status and opt-out handling next; if compliant, escalate the exact message IDs and activity timestamps.”

Common rationalizations to avoid

Do not infer delivery failure from missing customer-side webhooks until Sent webhook event history and endpoint responses are checked. Webhook ingestion failures often mimic delivery failures.

Do not label a campaign “carrier filtered” from a small sample without comparing baseline, country, sender/profile, and template. Filtering is a conclusion after cohort isolation, not a synonym for “failed.”

Do not treat READ as a universal stage. Sent documents read receipts for WhatsApp and RCS; SMS generally does not support read receipts.

Do not mistake broadcast for fallback. Omitted channel or ["sent"] enables automatic routing; one explicit channel pins delivery; multiple explicit values create separate messages. Count every returned message_id once and report the selected channel.

Verification checklist

• The analysis uses Sent message_id values as the primary unit.
• The cohort is pinned by time window, profile/sender identity, template, channel, and recipient segment.
• Status math uses the latest known status per Sent message ID.
• Transition math uses observed activity histories and never backfills stages from a latest-only status.
• Pending or in-flight messages are either excluded or reported separately.
• SMS delivery analysis stops at DELIVERED; WhatsApp/RCS READ is labeled engagement.
• Global and channel × direction totals reconcile, including malformed and explicit unknown buckets.
• Webhook configuration, event history, and endpoint test results are checked when the symptom is missing callbacks.
• Channel-specific failures are split before aggregate rates are reported.
• Provider or carrier codes are quoted exactly as observed and not invented from a lookup table.
• The final recommendation names one next verification step and the evidence that justifies it.

Related skills

Use sms-10dlc-registration when the leak points to US A2P SMS compliance, brand registration, campaign registration, or opt-in/opt-out evidence.

Use rcs-agent-onboarding when the symptom points to RCS agent approval, launch readiness, capability gaps, or fallback design rather than live delivery analytics.

Use sender-profile-architect when the issue is tenant/profile isolation, webhook routing, credential scoping, or multi-brand sender design.

Use waba-template-author or template-builder-ui when the root cause is WhatsApp template category, review status, template payload structure, or authoring workflow.

Use the sent skill for shared Sent terminology and routing.

Bundled references and scripts