This guide will help you understand and sell our powerful new WhatsApp tracking feature, Message Trail. Think of it as a super-smart reporting tool for any automated template messages your customers send via our API.

1. Use Cases: Who Needs Message Trail?

Message Trail is perfect for any customer who wants to track the performance of their automated WhatsApp messages. It's not for CSV-based campaigns, but for messages triggered via an API.

Here are some common scenarios:

• Tracking Transactional Messages: An e-commerce company sends automated messages for "Order Confirmation," "Shipped," and "Delivered." By creating a trail for each (e.g., "OrderStatus"), they can monitor the delivery and read rates for these critical updates, ensuring their notification system is working perfectly.

• Monitoring Authentication Messages: A financial app sends One-Time Passwords (OTPs) for login or transaction approvals. Using a trail named "LoginOTPs," their tech team can instantly see the success rate of these messages, helping them quickly diagnose any user login problems.

• Measuring Triggered Marketing/Utility Messages: A company sends an automated welcome message when a user subscribes to an event or newsletter. Message Trail allows them to group all these "Welcome" messages to see how many new subscribers are actually reading them.

2. Benefits: Why Customers Will Love It

Focus on these key advantages that solve major customer headaches:

• Monitor the Health of Your Automated Messages: Don't just send messages; know they're being received and read. Message Trail gives you a live dashboard on the performance of your most important communications (like OTPs or order updates).

• Organize Your Messaging: Instead of a single, messy log of all API messages, you get a clean view where similar messages are grouped together. Instantly see the performance of "Order Confirmations" vs. "Password Resets."

• Save Time with Automated Reporting: No more asking developers to dig through logs! Get one-click reports on any category of messages you're tracking.

• Make Smarter, Data-Driven Decisions: Find out if your welcome messages are being ignored or if delivery rates for a specific notification are dropping. Use this data to improve your messaging strategy.

3. Availability & Limits

Here are a few key details to keep in mind when discussing the feature with customers:

• Plan Availability: The Message Trail feature is available on all of our plans except for the "Compact" plan.

• Trail Limit: A customer can create a maximum of 1,000 unique trails per WABA phone number.

4. How to Use: It's Simple!

Customers will love how easy it is to get started and use.

Step 1: The One-Time Setup (For their Tech Team)

• To track a category of messages, their developer simply needs to add an extra parameter called "trail" when sending a template message through our API.

• Inside this, they'll specify a "name" that describes the message type. For example: "trail": { "name": "OrderStatusUpdates" }.

• Trail Name Rules: The "name" must follow these rules:

• It must be a string (text). Numbers, boolean values (true/false), or objects are not allowed.

• It must be alphanumeric and can include - (hyphen) and _ (underscore).

• The maximum length is 30 characters.

Step 2: Tracking Your Messages (For the User)

• Log in to the dashboard and go to the "Message Trail" section.

• You will see a list of all your message trails (e.g., "OrderStatusUpdates," "LoginOTPs").

• Filter your view by a specific date range like "Today," "Yesterday," "Last 7 Days," or a custom range to analyze performance over time.

• Click on any trail to see real-time stats for the selected period: how many messages were sent, delivered, fail, read, and replied to.

• Use the search bar to find a specific trail by name.

Important Note: The dashboard and reports will only show data from the last 6 months.

Step 3: Downloading Reports

• Next to each trail, there is a "Download" button.

• Click it to get a simple report (in CSV format) with all the details for that message category within your selected date range.

• Name

• Mobile Number

• Template Name

• Template Category

• Message Status (e.g., Read, Failed)

• Sent At (Timestamp)

• Delivered At (Timestamp)

• Read At (Timestamp)

• Replied At (Timestamp)

• Reply Type (e.g., Text, Media)

• Reply Text

• Failure Reason (if applicable)

• Link (the URL sent in the message)

• Link Clicked At (Timestamp)

• Link Tracking Note: The report can also include columns for “Link” and “Link Clicked At”. This data will only appear if the link tracking feature is enabled for the account and the specific message template has link tracking turned on.

The system also keeps things tidy by automatically archiving any trails that haven't been active for 6 months, ensuring the dashboard is always clean and relevant.