The Reports: Members page gives you both general and detailed information about your list's membership. You can learn about subscriber activity for the list—how many people have joined recently? Or for a certain time period?
You can also see what the total membership for your list is, and what their status is—are they receiving mail, or are they unsubscribed or on hold?
The Reports: Members page also display what kinds of members are on your list—are they receiving normal mail, or are they set to receive a digest or no mail? The member kind is important if your list is a discussion list.
You may also get a count of members by domain, and for major domains. Knowing that a large portion of your mailing is going to a particular domain may help you tailor your message for those recipients, or explain why mailings are slow to close out if a particular domain is having trouble that day.
Mail Formats show you a member's formatting preferences - text, HTML, or AOL - and whether a member has HTML reading capability. In order to have statistics about opens, you must set Track Opens to Yes in Mailings: New Mailing: Tracking.
Member counts are displayed in two ways: as tables, or as charts. Most tables may be downloaded as CSV files, which may then be opened using applications such as Excel.
The reports are grouped as follows:
Shows a table of subscription information about your list.
Charts about member attributes that affect how or whether they are receiving your mailings.
A chart of the distribution of members across all of your lists.
Charts about how your membership is distributed across different domains.
Charts about demographic values that you have inserted into your members table.
Subscription information about your list over time.
Statistical Integrity of Member Counts
It is important to keep in mind that the integrity of the statistics reported by ListManager is highly dependent on two things: 1) your list and server settings, and 2) administrator activity.
The aggressiveness of your purge settings can have an impact on the data reported. Consider a weekly mailing list where members are put on hold after two permanent failures, and are never notified of their hold status. Also consider a "Purge Held" setting of five days. You look at your Member Counts once a week.
With this configuration in mind, it is conceivable that after a mailing, some percentage of members will be put on hold. Five days later, they will be purged. This all happens between the times you look at reports. In other words, many members have moved from normal status to held status, and have then been deleted. Thus, these purged members are not "new held" members nor are they "new unsubscribed" members when the next report is run—they have effectively disappeared. This will create an effect that the numbers from week to week "don't add up", which can be misleading.
This situation may be remedied by having less aggressive purge settings. Specifically, the purge held setting should be increased to something greater than the report frequency (for weekly reports then, you would want to increase the "purge held" setting to something greater than seven days, thereby preventing members from being put on hold and subsequently deleted prior to the next time you view reports.)
Another situation that leads to the numbers appearing to not add up is administrator activity. Specifically, if an administrator deletes members either using the web interface or via email commands, those members have moved from normal status to a status that is not monitored by the reporting (deleted). In both cases, the illusion is that "normal" members have disappeared. Please keep that in mind when you are analyzing your figures.
More
1. Reports
1. View Mailing
2. Reports: Members
3. Reports: Server Performance