RSVP Reporting Problems

[SusanDS360]

Has anyone else encountered problems with the RSVP response reports? We sent an email out today with an RSVP response block with three options on it. The report and .csv export has as many as 200 duplicate records most triplicated with all three responses. Chat support said they are aware of the problem but have no estimate as to when the problem will be fixed. 

Chat support said I should take the earliest timestamp and assume that is the correct one. But that wont work because all of the sets of duplicates have the exact same timestamp. 

The email detail reporting shows 134 clicks. But we have over 350 responses so we know that's not right.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any workarounds that you know of? We have a major event in 16 days and need the data to be correct.

[Nick_S]

Hi @SusanDS360,

I am sorry to hear you are experiencing this issue. It is true our engineers are still investigating a fix for it. I believe I was able to get you an accurate report based on current numbers (139), though.

I'll Be There (6)

I'll Try (4)

I Can't Make It (129)

I was able to export the report on my end (I believe you would need to upgrade to export this report) and I was able to remove duplicates. From what I could tell, all duplicates recorded the same answer for each contact that was duplicated, so by just removing the excess contacts I was able to narrow it down to 139 unique clicks/responses. Without using the shortcut tools of something like Excel or Sheets, I can at least point out that if you look at the (very long) URLs for each response under the Click-Through Distribution, you'll see that they are basically identical up to a certain point. I'll Be There's unique coding starts with (XFYM), I'll Try (XXN6), and I Can't Make It (WrUS). If you get more responses, you can look for these identifiers and compare it to the duplicated contacts (not all contacts are being duplicated, so they might be easier to identify as new clicks come through and they have unique time stamps).

I know this is a bit cumbersome, but hopefully this at least helps you in the short-term and we will continue to investigate this issue and get it resolved.

[SusanDS360]

There is no way to tell (that I can see) how to determine the actual choice the recipient made when they are the same contact, with the same time stamp and all three choices selected. They duplicate responses are all in the order as they appear in the RSVP block.

The stats for the Click Rate for the email are 143 (12%) of 1305 Sends. The total count for all RSVPs's Responses is 341. Shouldn't the total Click Rate be the sum of the individual RSVP clicks? Again, even if we upgrade and export the RSVP report how would we know which duplicates should be eliminated?  And there is no way we are going to try and send the email again "hoping" that the RSVP 
function will work. 

[Caitlin_M]

Hi @SusanDS360. A few things to cover:

The click rate is determined by the unique number of contacts who click on a link in the email, not the total clicks.

For the duplicate responses, this is usually caused by a contact's security system pre-clicking links in an email prior to releasing it to the inbox. You will need to export the RSVP report and use an outside program to delete the duplicate responses that occur at the same time.

[SusanDS360]

OK. So the Click Rate is the number of different contacts that clicked on any link in an email. In this case it is 145. The total clicks by those 147 people 343. Being as the average of clicks per unique contact is 2.33 (343/147)  how do we know which response is correct and which are the unintended responses from the recipient when all of the duplicates have identical timestamps?

We know how to export and filter data but need to know the criteria we would use to determine how to filter. Does the Upgraded export have hour/minute/and seconds added so that we can see the order they clicked. We have used other response/email/survey SaaS services before and this is the first time we have ever had to deal with email systems that pre-click links in a email that register as human clicks.

That would seem to invalidate the whole Event Management and RSVP model.

Do you expect that the tech team will issue some type of notification when they get the issue resolved? We aren't going to take the chance of trying again until that time.

Thanks for you help. I know it's not anything you can fix. 

[Nick_S]

So, the export shows the hour and minute, but not second. However, while it's not impossible that one of the contacts opened the email within the second it was sent and received and clicked on the button, we can probably infer they did not, so looking at the export again, we would sort/filter by the "Clicked At" column (I know you can't see what I'm saying) and look for any clicks that happened within a minute or so of the email being sent, especially if it shows 3 clicks from the same person all within the same minute. That actually leaves us with 30 most likely authentic clicks, though there are duplicates in those but with different time stamps (which suggests they may have clicked again to update their choice).

As a courtesy, I'm going to send you the export file I created in a private message so you can see what I'm saying. It will already be sorted by "Clicked At."

EDIT: We have set up a case in your account so that you will be notified when the issue is resolved. Forgot to mention that before.