How is CTR calculated?
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The formula is simple: unique clicks divided by delivered emails, multiplied by 100.
So if you sent to 10,000 subscribers and 250 clicked, your click-through rate is 2.5%.
One thing to watch: some ESPs report total clicks (counting every click from the same person) and others report unique clicks (one per subscriber, regardless of how many times they clicked). These give different numbers for the same campaign. Check which one your ESP defaults to before comparing against industry benchmarks or your past campaigns.
CTR doesn't tell you about the quality of the traffic or whether people converted after clicking. But it tells you how many people in your audience were moved enough to do something. That makes it a stronger signal than open rate alone, especially now that Apple Mail is pre-fetching open pixels and inflating open counts.
If you want to measure engagement specifically among the people who opened (not everyone who received), look at click-to-open rate instead.
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