Overview: Your Engage Messaging dashboard and billing report may show different totals, and that’s expected. Here’s a breakdown of why that happens, what each view represents, and how to validate your usage.
Why doesn’t the dashboard match the billing usage? The dashboard focuses on campaign activity for outbound leads, while billing is based on total message segments, including both outbound and inbound traffic. This includes outbound campaign messages, inbound responses from leads, and messages split into multiple segments when they exceed character limits.
What is a message segment? A segment is a unit of SMS billing. Most short code messages are billed per segment, not per message. The first segment is up to 160 characters, messages longer than 160 characters are automatically split into 153-character segments (with some space reserved for reassembly headers), and a single message may result in 2 or more segments, especially for long responses or campaign messages with dynamic content.
What does the dashboard include? The Engage Messaging dashboard tracks metrics for outbound campaign messaging only, including sent messages, delivered messages, and engagement rates. Inbound replies, multi-segment calculations, and message metadata are not displayed in the dashboard metrics.
What does billing include? Your invoice is based on the total number of message segments sent and received during a billing cycle. This gives you a complete picture of actual carrier usage, including all outbound segments, all inbound segments, and any multi-segment messages.
How can I audit or verify my usage? You can download Message Details from your Engage Messaging dashboard at any time. These reports provide full visibility into message timestamps, character and segment counts, direction (inbound/outbound), and lead and campaign context. This is the best way to reconcile dashboard metrics with billed usage.
Any additional questions? Please open a ticket with support.