Where do your cold emails actually land?
Your sequencer says "delivered." That only means the receiving server accepted the message — not that it reached the inbox. For cold email, the gap between delivered and inboxed is where campaigns quietly die.
Delivered is not inboxed
"Delivered" means the mail wasn't bounced. It says nothing about whether it landed in the Primary inbox, the Promotions/Updates tab, or the spam folder. A campaign can show 98% delivered and still be mostly invisible if half of it is filtered to spam.
What an inbox placement test measures
An inbox placement test (IPT) sends seed messages to a panel of real accounts across providers and records where each one lands. Instead of guessing from open rates (which are unreliable on cold email), you get a concrete breakdown: inbox vs spam vs other, per provider.
Reading results by provider
Placement is never uniform. You might inbox well at Google and get filtered at Microsoft, or pass consumer mailboxes but fail behind corporate security gateways. Reading placement by provider tells you exactly where to focus — which domains, which mailboxes, which recipients.
Placement pairs naturally with ESP reply-rate analytics (who's actually replying, by provider) and domain health (whether a domain is burning).
Why it matters for cold email
Cold email lives or dies on placement. If you can't see where mail lands, you're optimizing blind. Cocolytics runs automated inbox placement tests so placement becomes a number you track — not a guess you make after a campaign underperforms.
FAQ
Isn't a high open rate enough to know I'm inboxing?
No. Open tracking is unreliable on cold email (pre-fetching, blocked pixels, privacy proxies). Placement tests measure landing directly instead of inferring it.
How often should I test placement?
Regularly, and especially after changing domains, warmup, or volume. Automated tests keep it continuous instead of one-off.
What if I land in Promotions instead of spam?
Better than spam, worse than Primary for cold outreach. The test surfaces it so you can adjust content and sending patterns.