I was looking at the Top Emails report on my HubSpot dashboard.
I noticed on this report there were two similar-sounding metrics.
Click Rate and Clikc Through Rate.
To me, these both sound like one and the same thing - but the values being reported are very different so clearly they are not.
Can someone point me towards (or provide) the definition of Click Rate vs Click Through Rate as used by this HubSpot report?
Moderator Note: This post was reviewed for relevancy and optimized for clarity on April 6, 2026. Thank you for your contributions to the HubSpot Community!
I’d like to believe this, but your own blog post contradicts this answer. Straight from the HubSpot blog: “CTR = Number of People Who Clicked A Link / Number of Emails Delivered Successfully x 100”
Click Rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of the people who were delivered your email. Click Through Rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of the people who opened your email.
For Example:
Total Delivered: 500
Total Opened: 300
Total Link Click: 200
Click Rate: (200/500)*100 = 40%
Click Through Rate: (200/300)*100 = 66%
Hope it helps.
Click Rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of the people
who were delivered
your email. Click Through Rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of the people
who opened
your email.
I highlighted the font in red where I found the difference in the definitions, however it still isn’t clicking for me. How can someone click a link on an email delivered, but not opened? that’s one in the same to me.
Kate - I have the exact same blip in understanding the difference. How can someone that was delivered an email, click on the link? They would have had to have opened it, no? I also don’t understand.
The number of people clicking in both instances is the same (they ALL opened the email), what makes the difference is what it is measured against. In click rate, it’s being measured against the delivered emails, in click through rate, it’s measured against the number of opens. For example:
1000 people got delivered an email
100 people opened an email
I think I understand this now thanks to your explanation, but this seems almost intentionally confusing…
It’s sort of like CTR’s are under the umbrella of click-rates. So, why not just talk about the CTR number since that has includes both people to whom the email was delivered, they opened, and they clicked…but, that’s sort of describing the click-rate too.
Ugh. They need to pick one and stick with it.
They’re actually providing you different metrics to let you take different actions. You might be interested in click rate to know, for example, how many people out of your ENTIRE email send clicked a link: “Oh, I emailed my whole customer list, and 10% of my customers clicked a link.” You might not care at all what the clickthrough rate is, in this example -- just that 10% of your customers clicked something.
Clickthrough rate, on the other hand, tells you how many people clicked the link *only* out of those that opened it. Thus, if your click rate was low but your clickthrough rate was high, you would know that not many people opened the email (and check the open rate to validate that knowledge), but for those who did, it was very effective in getting them to click -- so you would know for future campaigns that your body copy was effective in driving clicks, but maybe your subject line (for example) needed work to get more people to open.
These are just examples of why these two metrics exist, and why they might be important to different people for different reasons. Hope it’s helpful to someone, either now or to someone who might find this thread in the future
So one metric will measure how many people clicked the link in the email but ONLY if they OPENED the email.
The other metric will measure how many people clicked the link but didn’t necessarily open the whole email to click the link, just saw the email in the preview pane and clicked the link?
No, that’s not quite it, @ELeahy -- it can be confusing, for sure! Maybe a practical example:
Let’s say I have a list of 100 people that I send an email to. 30 people open that email. 10 of those 30 people click a link in that email.
The Click rate would be 10 clicks / 100 sends, or 10%.
The Clickthrough rate would be 10 clicks / 30 opens, or ~ 33%.
So I could say, then, that of the list I sent it to, 10% of the people clicked something. I could also say that of the people who opened my email, 33% of them clicked something.
Now, suppose you had similar results across all your email sends. An interesting way of looking at it would be to say “Well, I know that when I send an email, only 10% of my list are going to click something. But I know that of the people who open my email, more than a third will click something. So, I’m going to focus on improving my subject lines to see if I can get more people to open my emails.”
How is this possible? Click-through rate will always be higher than the click rate because the number of people the email was delivered to will always be higher than (or at least equal to) the number of people who opened the email. Hence, your rate will always be higher if your divisor is lower.
