Is your click-through rate really what you think it is?

When it comes to online marketing, metrics are important. You need to be able to analyze the data to find out if your marketing efforts are working. This goes far beyond simply looking for an uptick in sales whenever you run a new advertising campaign. You want to know exactly what worked, why it worked, what did not work and how you can replicate those results moving forward.

With email marketing, one of the main tactics used to do this is to consider the click-through rate. But is that rate really what you expect it to be? There are two main ways that it is defined, but each definition could come up with a very different number. It’s critical to know exactly which one is being used in your situation.

Clicking on the email

First of all, some companies measure the rate by looking at how many people click on the email out of how many emails were sent. If you sent out 100 emails to people on your mailing list and 10 people clicked on the email, that would be a click-through rate of 10%.

Clicking a link in the email

But the other way to calculate it is by looking at how many people actually click the link that is presented to them in the email itself. This could be a link to your storefront or a specific product. Perhaps the email is telling the reader about a new product launch, and the link directs them to the product page on your website. This CTR is calculated by looking not just at the number of people who opened the email, but at how many of them actually clicked the link within it and were funneled effectively to your website.

You could get very different results

As you can see, this could lead you to quite different results based on how things are being calculated. If the email provider tells you that you had a click-through rate of 10%, you may believe that 10 people clicked on the link and ended up on your site. This can help you figure out what your conversion rate looks like because you can see how many of those individuals then went on to make a purchase.

But what if the company is actually just telling you that 10% of the people who got the email opened it? The other 90% ignored it or deleted it. But even among those who did open it, that does not necessarily mean they navigated to your site. Perhaps no one clicked on the link at all.

For one thing, this drastically changes your conversion rate calculations. For another, it could indicate that there are issues with your email that are causing people not to follow the link, even when they do read the marketing copy. You need to know what those issues are so they can be rectified.

Here at Content Customs, we have extensive experience analyzing advertising metrics and creating effective content. Get in touch with us today if you’d like to learn more about how we can help your business moving forward.