Getting more data from each SMS message you send with MessageBird

It is all about data nowadays. Especially with messaging, we want to understand what happened with our messages: like where they were delivered, or how much they cost. When sending a marketing campaign, for example, you need to know how much the messages cost in order to know the ROI of the campaign. 

Seeing this demand, MessageBird’s SMS API will now include information on the price per message and metadata like country and operators’ names for every SMS message you send with us. This should help improve the communications you send to your users and give you more insight around those messages. We will perform this change as a gradual rollout over the next two weeks. 

That means that you can get all the information you need without sending a message to our dear Customer Success team. You can also integrate that information into your own Business Intelligence tools for reporting purposes. Our hope is to enable as much autonomy and velocity on decision making for our customers as possible.

What’s the update? 

We’ve upgraded our SMS API to provide price information, currency, country and operator names, status reasons, and more on its response and in the report webhook URL. So, on top of the current information we share, the SMS API response will now provide fields like:

• Recipient country: name of the country where the recipient number belongs to
• Recipient country prefix: international country code number (e.g. +31, +58, etc)
• Recipient operator: MCCMNC code and name of the network operator to which the number belongs to
• Message length: number of characters that the body of the message has
• Status reason: a written description of the reason for the status of the message. For example, if it failed, why it failed
• Price: price cost of that specific message it was billed with
• Currency: the currency the specific message was billed with

What’s the benefit?

• Cost Per Message — Previously, you would need to check our dashboard for after-the-fact message cost. Now, you will get the exact cost of the SMS messages in real-time or through the status report. You can also integrate this information into your own business intelligence systems.
• Descriptive Naming —  Now you will receive descriptive country and operator names, useful for your own reporting and BI processes, along with the pertinent MCCMNC codes.
• Character Count and Cost — Now, you can understand how many characters a message has and the related costs per message part. 

How does it look?

The response of the API will now include this new information, see below under the “statusDatetime” line:

And reportURL will look like this: