Reading Your SMS Campaign Delivery Reports

After a campaign sends, SimpliSend tracks every individual message through its own lifecycle rather than just reporting one aggregate number for the whole batch - which matters when a handful of messages fail and you need to know exactly which ones, not just that "some" did.

The status values, explained

• QUEUED - accepted by the platform, not yet sent to the network
• SENDING - in the process of being handed to the network aggregator
• SENT - accepted by the aggregator; a credit has been deducted
• DELIVERED - confirmed delivered to the handset by the carrier's delivery report
• FAILED - rejected by the network or the aggregator (bad number, network issue) - no credit deducted for these
• BLOCKED - stopped before sending by the content moderation check, most often for a high-severity flag

SENT vs DELIVERED - why both exist

SENT means the aggregator accepted the message; DELIVERED means the destination carrier confirmed it actually reached the handset. Most messages move from SENT to DELIVERED within seconds, but a message can sit at SENT if the recipient's phone is off or out of coverage - that's not necessarily a failure, just a delivery report that hasn't arrived yet.

What to do about FAILED messages

A FAILED status carries a delivery-status message with the specific reason where the network provides one. The most common cause by far is an invalid or disconnected number - worth removing or correcting in your contact list rather than resending to the same number in future campaigns. Since failed sends aren't charged a credit, cleaning bad numbers out of a list is really just good list hygiene, not a billing concern.

What BLOCKED means

A BLOCKED message was stopped by the automated content check described in our compliance guide, before it ever reached the network. This is rare for ordinary campaigns - it exists for genuinely harmful content - and a blocked message also creates a moderation flag visible under your account's moderation review, so you can see exactly why it was stopped.

Reading these reports regularly is the easiest way to keep both your delivery rate and your contact list quality high over time - a list that's never pruned of failed numbers slowly accumulates dead weight that costs nothing in credits but drags down the read of every future report.