Inbox placement testing
Inbox placement testing sends real emails from your inboxes to seed mailboxes so you can see, by inbox, whether your mail lands in the primary inbox, spam, or promotions - before it costs you a campaign.
Overview
Inbox placement testing is the only direct measurement of where your emails actually land. Open rates and bounce rates do not tell you whether the inboxes that never opened are silently collecting your messages in spam. Placement testing does.
Ken runs two kinds of placement tests:
- Automated weekly tests - Every week the system picks up your latest active campaign copy, sends it from your real sending inboxes to a panel of Google and Outlook seed mailboxes, and writes back a per-inbox verdict: inbox, spam, promotions, and full SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication results for every email.
- On-demand test - You can trigger a test at any time from the Email Delivery page. Results appear within the hour.
Both are accessed at /delivery (the "Email Delivery" page in the left sidebar). The on-demand button is on the Analytics tab inside the "Delivery Stats" card.
Before you start
- You must have an active workspace with at least one connected inbox managed by the warmup engine (Warmy). Inboxes that are not on the warmup system are not eligible for on-demand placement tests via the button. Contact the Ken team if you are unsure whether your inboxes are enrolled.
- The Warmup tab (where per-inbox placement scores appear alongside warmup stats) is visible to Ken internal team members only. Clients see placement scores on the Analytics tab inside the "Delivery Stats" card.
How to run an on-demand placement test
- Open the Email Delivery page from the left sidebar (
/delivery). - On the Analytics tab, find the "Delivery Stats" card on the right side of the grid.
- Click Run placement test at the bottom of that card.
- The button shows "Running..." while the test is being queued. A success toast confirms how many inboxes were queued (for example, "Placement test started for 4 inboxes. Results appear in your placement score within the hour.").
- Wait up to one hour. The "Inbox Placement Score" figure in the Delivery Stats card updates automatically once results are written by the backend.
Reading results on the Warmup tab (internal / Ken team)
If you have access to the Warmup tab under Email Delivery, the inbox table shows a "Placement" column for every inbox. Each row shows inbox rate and spam rate side by side (for example, "83% inbox / 12% spam"). A "--" means no test result has been recorded for that inbox yet. Click Configure on any row to open the warmup configuration dialog, which includes a "Latest placement test" panel with the most recent scores.
What "Inbox Placement Score" means
The score shown in the Delivery Stats card is the percentage of tested emails that landed in the primary inbox across all your inboxes. A score of 100% means every seed email landed in the inbox. A score below 80% is worth investigating.
How it works
When you click "Run placement test," the system creates a placement checker for each of your Warmy-managed inboxes. The emails are sent to a fixed panel of seed mailboxes covering Google and Outlook accounts.
The system uses your actual latest campaign copy, not a synthetic test message. Template variables are filled in with plausible dummy values, and any unfilled tokens are stripped. This means the verdict reflects the reputation risk of the real content your prospects receive, not a clean canary message.
Results are written back asynchronously. An hourly background job polls the placement provider for scores and fills in per-inbox inbox rate, spam rate, and authentication results. That is why the button message says "within the hour" rather than "check back now."
Automated weekly tests follow the same logic but run on a per-client schedule automatically. The schedule is deterministic - your account always runs at the same day and hour each week.
Key facts about how tests are counted and deduped:
- An inbox that already has a completed or in-flight test within the past 24 hours will not get a second checker minted. This prevents duplicate requests and rate-limit errors.
Troubleshooting & debugging
Symptom: The "Run placement test" button shows a warning toast - "No Warmy-managed inboxes were found to test for this workspace." Cause: None of your inboxes are currently enrolled in Warmy warmup. Fix: Go to the Warmup tab (internal team) and check whether any inbox has an active warmup plan with Warmy as the provider. If no inboxes are configured for Warmy, contact the Ken team to enroll them. The on-demand placement test only creates checkers for inboxes the warmup engine already manages.
Symptom: The "Inbox Placement Score" has not updated after more than an hour. Cause: Either the results have not come back from the provider yet, or the background poller job is delayed. What to check: Click the Refresh button at the top right of the Email Delivery page to bust the 24-hour cache and force a re-fetch. If the score still does not update after another 30 minutes, the test may have been marked as failed (results did not arrive within 4 hours of sending). In that case, run a fresh on-demand test.
Symptom: The "Run placement test" button shows an error toast - "You do not have permission to run a placement test." Cause: Your account role does not have permission to trigger placement tests for this workspace. Fix: Ask a workspace owner or the Ken team to check your role assignment.
Symptom: Placement score is unexpectedly low (under 60%). Likely causes: Recent warmup gaps; a new domain with insufficient warmup age; DNS misconfiguration (SPF, DKIM, or DMARC failing); content triggering spam filters; or a sending IP that has been listed on a blocklist. What to check: On the Domains tab, review the DNS health column for any failing records. On the Inboxes tab, check whether individual inboxes show blacklist flags. On the Warmup tab, confirm that "Plan status" is active for the affected inboxes and that current daily volume is within a healthy ramp range. If SPF/DKIM/DMARC failures appear in the per-inbox placement results, fix DNS before re-testing.
Symptom: Warmup tab shows "--" in the Placement column for all inboxes even after running a test. Cause: The test result has not been written back yet, or the page is showing cached data. Fix: Wait up to one hour after running the test, then click Refresh to clear the cache. If "--" persists after a full hour, check whether the on-demand test returned a non-zero "testsCreated" count in the success toast. A count of 0 means no checkers were created and no results will appear.
Symptom: Clicking "Run placement test" after a recent test shows a success toast, but "testsCreated" is smaller than your total inbox count. Cause: Some inboxes were deduped because a completed or in-flight test exists for them within the past 24 hours. This is expected. The system suppresses duplicate checker creation to avoid rate-limit errors with the placement provider. Inboxes that were already tested recently will not be re-tested until the 24-hour window expires.
Symptom: The placement score fluctuates significantly week to week. Cause: Small seed panel sizes mean variance is expected. A single email landing in spam can move the score noticeably if the total number of inboxes tested is small. What to check: Look at the trend over 3-4 weeks rather than a single data point. Consistent degradation (not one-off variance) is the signal to act on.
FAQ
How often does the automated weekly test run? Once per week, at a fixed day and time that is deterministically assigned to your account. You will not receive a notification, but scores update on the Email Delivery page after each run. You can run an additional on-demand test at any time without affecting the weekly schedule.
Does the test use my real campaign copy? Yes. The system picks copy from your latest active campaign and fills in dummy values for any template variables. If no active campaign exists it falls back to a completed campaign. This means the placement verdict reflects the actual content your prospects receive, not a synthetic canary. Any remaining unfilled tokens are stripped before the test send.
Why do I see fewer inboxes tested than I have configured? Only inboxes enrolled in Warmy warmup are eligible. If some of your inboxes are managed by a different warmup provider or have no active warmup plan, they will not be included in the placement test run.
The test succeeded but scores are still "--". What is happening? Results are written back by a background job that runs hourly. After triggering a test, wait up to one hour. Then click Refresh on the Email Delivery page to clear the cache and see fresh data. If scores are still missing after 90 minutes, the test run may have encountered an error on the provider side. Run a new on-demand test and watch for any error toast.
Can I trigger a placement test for a specific inbox, or only for all inboxes at once? The "Run placement test" button on the Analytics tab tests all eligible inboxes for your workspace. There is no single-inbox trigger available from the UI. The Ken team has an internal sweep tool that can target a single client or inbox on request.
Does running an on-demand test count against any limit or cost? The 24-hour dedup window means the same inbox cannot be tested more than once per day via the on-demand button. Outside of that window, you can run additional on-demand tests without restriction from the UI.