Measuring Messaging Volume: Total Messages Sent and Received
Track how many messages your customers, agents, and bots exchange on your messaging channels — as a single number, as a trend over time, and broken down by country.
Why Track Messaging Volume?
Messaging channels are increasingly priced per message (for example, WhatsApp's per-message, per-country pricing). That makes raw message volume a direct cost line — not just a productivity stat. These metrics give you the total number of messages flowing through your messaging conversations, including bot traffic, so you can estimate channel costs, spot volume spikes, and see which countries drive the most conversation.
The Metrics and How They Are Calculated
There are three metrics, and each is a simple sum over your messaging conversations in the selected date range:
Total Messages Received — messages sent by your end users (your customers).
Total Messages Sent — messages sent by your business: agents and bots combined.
Total Messages — Received + Sent, i.e. every message exchanged.
Each metric comes in three variants, depending on which slice of messaging traffic you want to count:
Conversation metrics — the most complete count. Every messaging conversation is included, even conversations that were fully handled by a bot and never became a ticket. All of a conversation's messages count toward the date the conversation started.
Ticket metrics — only messages on conversations that are attached to tickets. All of a ticket's messages count toward the date the ticket was created.
Bot Interaction metrics — only messages exchanged during bot conversations (end-user messages plus bot messages), counted toward the date the bot interaction started.
If you just want "how many messages did we exchange in total?", use the Conversation variants.
Where to Find the Metrics
Open any dashboard and click Edit in the top bar.
Click an Add Widget button on the row where you want the metric.
Pick a widget type — Quick stat for a single number, Basic chart for a trend over time, or Donut chart for a country breakdown.
Search for "total messages". The metrics appear under Sunshine Conversation Metrics.
Select the widget you want and click Add Widget.
Available Views
Each metric is available as a quick stat (single number with change versus the previous period) and as an over-time chart so you can watch volume trend day by day:
Each metric also has a by-country donut chart, based on the conversation's location — the right lens for estimating per-country, per-message channel pricing:
Filtering
Date range — every widget respects the dashboard date filters.
Country — country breakdowns include all conversations with a known location, including bot-only conversations that never became tickets.
Channel — channel filters work through the conversation's linked ticket. Conversations that never became a ticket have no channel, so channel-filtered numbers only cover ticketed traffic.
Not Seeing Data?
These metrics require messaging conversation tracking to be enabled for your account. If the widgets don't appear in the widget picker, or show zeros where you expect volume, reach out to us and we'll get you set up.