Click-Through-Rate OR Click-To-Open-Rate?

Many ESPs either choose to display the click rate of your email campaigns as either Click-Through-Rate (CTR), or Click-To-Open-Rate (CTOR).

Which should you report on? I would suggest reporting on both but decision on either should align your reports with your goals.

It is important to understand the true click engagement rate from both ratios, but for me, I sway to CTOR. Knowing the rate of unique clicks against the unique openers gives me a clearer picture of how the content alone is performing and is engaging enough the the recipient.

Now if your ESP doesn’t display the CTOR, Email-Postman has provided a simple calculator and excel formula below. All you need to do is enter the campaigns unique clicks and unique opens in the form below for the CTOR percentage.

If however, you have a large amount of campaign data you wish to report the CTOR, here is the excel formula:

Next step is to add a new column to your campaign data titled “CTOR,” and enter the formula below, replacing the cells in the brackets.

=(Unique clicks/unique opens)*100

Replace “unique clicks” with the relevant unique clicks field
Replace “unique opens” with the relevant unique opens field

For example:

Email Unique clicks Unique opens CTOR (%)
Jan 350 2550 =(B2/C2)*100
Feb 200 1950

Which will then display like this:

Email Unique clicks Unique opens CTOR (%)
Jan 350 2550 13.73
Feb 200 1950