One of the advantages of email marketing is that it allows us to measure all the interactions of a user with the email we have sent. As professionals, it is essential to know all the available metrics in order to choose the one that best answers the essential question of each mailing: what has worked well? Mixing up CTR and CTOR is a mistake and a myth that they are the same: they are similar, but take into account different parameters and therefore serve to measure different objectives.
What is CTR and when to use it
The Click Through Rate (CTR) is calculated by dividing the unique clicks obtained by all the links included in a mailing by the total number of messages delivered and multiplying the result by 100. For example: a campaign delivered to 5000 people that gets 250 unique clicks has a click through rate of 5%.
The CTR is based on the people to whom the campaign has been delivered, therefore without taking into account the returners and without assessing whether it has gone to the spam folder. The truth is that its formula does not expressly take into account whether our communication has been opened, although it can be considered that in order to click on any of the links included, it must be opened beforehand.
It is an appropriate metric to know if the calls to action (CTA) have achieved the click. For example: if we look at the CTR of each button, image or text that we have linked to the website, we will see which of them has worked best. In this way, we can also optimise the design of future mailings, such as if we find out that buttons get more clicks than text links.
If the objective of the campaign is to drive traffic to the online shop, seeing the evolution of the CTR will be very useful. For example: if we see that the CTR is increasing with each sending, it can be interpreted as the way of explaining or selling the products is becoming more and more interesting for our subscribers. We can apply this to future messages if we decide to repeat the theme with a higher CTR in order to try to increase conversions.
The click-through rate is a metric widely used in marketing, not only in email marketing. This is why it can be used to make comparisons with the results obtained in other channels. For example: if the email campaign achieves a 5% CTR and the ad on social networks does not reach 1%, in addition to valuing it independently according to the history of each channel, we can say in comparison that it achieved more interest in the inbox than in other media.
What is CTOR and when to use it
The Click Through Open Rate (CTOR) is calculated by dividing the unique clicks on all the links in a mailing by the unique opens it has had and multiplying the result by 100. For example: if the campaign we discussed above was opened by 2000 people, its click through rate is 12.5%.
The CTOR is based on the number of people who have opened the campaign, so it can be a more effective way of evaluating links because it only considers those who have shown a real interest in the message. That is why it does not take into account those who have deleted it without opening it or if they have done so, but to mark it as spam from the email manager, for example.
If the objective of email marketing is to give visibility to the brand, the CTOR provides more real information to the conclusions precisely by focusing attention on the openings made by users and not on those delivered as happens with the CTR.
It is also a logical continuation of the open rate in a conversion funnel, so it can also be used to measure this conversion as an intermediate conversion towards the sales goal. For example: following the case above, the open rate would be 40%, so a CTOR of 12.5% could perhaps be interpreted as low because it did not seem to meet the expectation that customers had when opening the campaign.
As the name suggests, calculating the click-through open rate takes into account a characteristic metric of email marketing such as the open rate. This makes it difficult to use the CTOR to compare click-through rates in other marketing strategies that do not distinguish whether the user has actually seen a message or it has simply been displayed without further interaction.
Differences and similarities between CTR and CTOR
The CTOR will always be higher than the CTR and that can be a point in favour of looking at this metric, but it is not convenient to stay with just one number because it is more favourable for the report. We must understand how the two metrics are similar or different in order to make decisions based on real data.
The CTR and the CTOR measure the clicks obtained from a mailing, but they differ in who they understand that can potentially do them: the CTR takes into account all the people who have received it and the CTOR only those who have opened it. This is why the CTOR is higher, because it uses a lower number in the percentage formula than the total used by the CTR.
This means that different techniques can be used to improve the results, for example increasing the quality of the database in the case of CTR or the open rate in the case of CTOR, as well as optimising the clicks that would obviously serve both percentages.
Continuing with this idea, since the CTR is based on the clicks obtained by all the links, it is possible to optimise it by making better CTAs and writing more eye-catching messages. But, in addition to these criteria, in the CTOR it is also necessary to take into account the subject or the sender because both affect the openings and can increase the final result.
