One of the Most Common Mistakes on
Company Marketing Reports.
Is your reporting correct?
One of the most commonly misrepresented and miscalculated metrics on marketing reports is email clickthrough rate.
Click through rate (CTR) and Click to open rate (CTOR) are often confused and sometimes miscalculated.
CTR = (Unique # of emails contacts clicked within) divided by (emails delivered)
CTOR = (Unique # of emails contacts clicked within) divided by (Unique # of emails opened)
The first metric is an overall measure of the campaign including subject line and content. The second metric looks at only the email content’s performance.
Very often I see even seasoned marketers reporting the CTOR rate as click through rate. This isn’t really accurate and overstates the numbers. Your CTOR is divided into a smaller figure, so naturally it is going to look larger.
That doesn’t mean that your marketing team is trying to inflate the numbers, it's just mis-labeled.
The other way I’ll see both these metrics measured wrong is dividing by too large of a number.
The number of emails delivered is not how may were on the list you sent to. It is how many were on the list you sent to –- minus how many of those email could not be delivered. It’s like how many postcards you sent minus how many came back return to sender.
The number of emails opened should be the unique # of emails opened. If John, Mary and Dylan all open your email and Dylan opens it 3 times your Opens are 5, but your Unique Opens are 3.
CTR and CTOR are very important metrics for understanding how your emails are performing. Calculating them and understanding what they measure is something your entire team should understand. When you take your reports one step further and stand them up against benchmarks for email performance in your industry, it becomes even more critical that you’ve done the math right.