What is click rate?
Click rate is the share of delivered messages whose recipient clicked through: clicks divided by deliveries. It is the messaging channel's action metric — the point where a reader becomes a visitor — and the most trustworthy engagement rate email has, since clicks are real actions where opens can be machine-inflated.
Formula
click rate = clicks ÷ deliveries
Note the denominator: this is not ad CTR (clicks ÷ impressions), and not click-to-open rate (clicks ÷ opens), which is also computed per row.
Worked example
A campaign delivers 48,500 emails and gets 1,200 clicks: click rate 2.5%. Its open rate is 33%, so the click-to-open rate is 1,200 ÷ 16,000 = 7.5%. The distinction directs the fix: weak click rate with a strong click-to-open rate means the subject line under-delivered readers to good content; the reverse means people opened and found nothing worth clicking.
How Saldo Metrics computes it
fact_messaging_performance stores platform-reported clicks and deliveries
per campaign or flow-message row. v_messaging_performance computes click_rate
and click_to_open_rate per row; v_flow_performance recomputes the rate from
summed clicks over summed deliveries per automation — totals first, division
second, so big sends weigh as much as they should. The list-health gauge is the
exception: v_list_health.avg_click_rate is a plain average of the individual
rows' click rates, so there a small send counts as much as a full-list one. Click rate works for SMS too: link taps are trackable where opens are
not, making it the one engagement rate that spans both media.
Why it matters
Clicks are where messaging revenue starts — the attributed revenue and margin on each campaign row come from orders that follow engagement, so click rate is the volume knob on everything downstream. It is also the honest engagement baseline for list health: a list can look fine on proxy-inflated opens while clicks quietly halve.
Common mistakes
- Confusing the three click metrics. Click rate (÷ deliveries), CTR (÷ impressions, ads) and click-to-open (÷ opens) answer different questions; quoting one as another misstates performance severalfold.
- Averaging campaign click rates. A tiny test send would count as much as a full-list campaign; the campaign and flow figures recompute from totals for exactly this reason. The list-health average does not, so read it as a rough gauge rather than a volume-weighted rate.
- Chasing clicks with misleading link copy. The click shows up here; the bounce and the missing orders show up in net margin.
Where you see this in the app
Marketing → Messaging, as the click-rate column of the campaign table, per flow in the flow waterfall, and in the list-health gauges.