Email click-through rates would seem to be a simple metric for email service providers to calculate to help publishers and advertisers determine newsletter performance: Of the number of emails sent, what percentage of recipients clicked a link in the email.
But no. Instead, some email newsletter platforms report click-through rates (CTR) as click-to-open rates (CTOR), which are measured against the number of emails opened. However, three newsletter authors told Digiday the methodologies behind calculating CTR don’t really matter to them — or to their advertisers, who either have methods to verify the newsletter data themselves or rely on other metrics in tandem with CTR to determine where to buy ads in emails.
Three different email service providers (ESPs) — Beehiiv, Mailchimp and Substack — calculate CTR using what is actually adopted by the industry as CTOR, according to a Digiday analysis and confirmations by Mailchimp and Substack (Beehiiv did not respond to requests for comment).
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