Click rate and click-through rate are the metrics of email marketing that shows how engaging your emails for the audience.
These numbers can help you to boost conversions and audience engagement by understanding and optimizing.

Let’s learn about more metrics further:
Why Click Rate and CTR Are Important?
Click Rate and CTR are main KPIs for the success of digital marketing. It helps to measure the engagement of business, improvement in content and get better ROI.
Performance Measurement
These metrics will help you to measure the engagement in ads, emails, websites and links.
A high CTR shows a strong audience is interested. On the other hand low CTR shows the issue of messaging and targeting issues.
It is used in email marketing, paid ads, SEO and social media campaigns.
Optimization Indicator
Optimizing helps to marketers to understand the weak spots in their campaign.
A/B testing can improve engagement in placements of headlines, CTAs and images.
Also Read: What Is Click Through Rate (CTR)? How to Improve It
Make sure that the right users see relevant content by refining audience segmentation.
Budget Efficiency & Ad Performance
High CTRs improve Quality Score, reducing Cost Per Click (CPC) and increasing ad visibility in PPC ads (Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads) with.
It leads to get better ROI with High CTRs that shows the effective ad creative and targeting.
What Is The Difference Between Click Rate And Click Through Rate?
Let’s discuss one by one!
What Is Click Rate (CR)?
It is commonly used in email marketing, paid ads and social media analytics to check engagement. Click rate do measures the percentage of users who click on a link than the total number of people who were sent the content.
Opposite to CTR, Click rate focuses on the total number of clicks including multiple clicks from one person and click rate focuses on how many recipients clicked at least one link.
Are you still confused? And theoretically thinking of it this way: In an email with 10 links that got 10 clicks, it’s possible that just one person clicked all of them — which can make CTR look higher than it actually is. But Click Rate (CR) shows the real story: it tells you that only one interested recipient clicked, not 10 different potential customers.
How Do You Calculate Click Rate?
The formula for click rate is:

Unique Clicks: The numbers of different recipients who have make clicking out at least one link. However, this doesn’t matter how many times they got clicking out; but each person is counted only one time.
Total Recipients: Total number of people who got the email.
Click Rate: Percentage of recipients who at least clicked one time at the link.
What is Click-Through Rate?
The emails that don’t encourage subscribers to click on a call-to-action won’t turn casual scrollers into paying customers. No matter your preview text is how attractive your subject line or tempting.
Also Read: What is Bounce Rate in SEO? How to Reduce & Check It?

A metric that tracks the numbers of recipients by calculating your click-through rate that how much click on links or buttons are there in your email. And you get valuable insight into what content grabs attention and drives conversions.
How To Calculate Click-Through Rate?
There’s only one main difference between calculating Click Rate and Click-Through Rate
CTR uses the number of subscribers who clicked outbound links or buttons inside your email Instead of using email opens.
Here you will use the same formula: divide the total number of clicks by the total recipients minus bounced emails. And, now we will get a percentage multiply the result by 100.
Click-Through Rate = Links/CTAs Clicked / (Emails Sent – Emails Bounced)
Click-Through Rate Example
Dan’s Gidget Shop sends their 857-person marketing list a monthly newsletter with links to featured products. 15 emails bounced of those and 87 recipients clicked the shop link.
Also Read: Click Through Rate Formula: How to Calculate It?
So, he will calculate this click-through rate as 96 / (857-15) = 0.11 x 100 = 11%.
Key Difference Between Click Rate And Click Through Rate
| Basis | Click Rate | Click-Through Rate (CTR) |
| Definition | This means percentage of people who making clicked out of total audience reached out. | This apposite, like as the percentage of users who clicked out of the total impressions serving. |
| Formula | (Total Clicks ÷ Total Audience or Delivered Messages) × 100 | (Total Clicks ÷ Total Impressions) × 100 |
| Focus | We can determine the engagement from the overall audience behavior. | But, here we do measures effectiveness of a certain ad or link based on views. |
| Used In | Email marketing, push notifications, SMS campaigns | Digital ads, search ads, display ads, social media ads |
| Indicates | Overall audience responsiveness | How compelling the ad/link is when shown |
| Example | 100 clicks from 1,000 emails sent → 10% Click Rate | |
How Do You Know If Your Metrics Are Good?
There is one of the best ways to compare those values to ones from previous campaigns to understand whether a campaign’s click rate and click through rate is strong or not.
You can check using MailerLite’s 2024 report. It is also a good idea to compare your click rates and click-through rates with industry benchmarks. (Just note that this report calls click-through rate the click-to-open rate.)
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Is Click Rate And Click Through Rate The Same?
Click rate and click-through rate (CTR) aren’t the same. Click rate does measure the clicks based on the total audience reached like emails delivered. On the other hand CTR measures clicks based on total impressions that how many times an ad or link was shown. They use different bases and show different performance insights.
What Is Impression And Impression Click Through Rate?
Whether the users do click it or not, an impression shows how many times an ad, email or webpage is shown to users. If we have to proceed about Impression click-through rate, then it allows to measure effectively content drives user engagement like (CTR).
And, how to calculate CTR (Click Through Rate)?
What’s The Difference Between Click Rate And Click Through Rate?
The main difference is the base used to calculate performance. Click rate measures the clicks as a percentage of the total audience reached like emails delivered or users targeted. If we talk about Click-through rate (CTR) that already mentioned above.
Final Thoughts
You can create more engaging email campaigns that can get the attention and make conversions. If you know the difference between click rate and click-through rate and how to use them to improve performance.
As it is discussed that the businesses that regularly track the click rate and the CTR they stay more flexible and respond faster. Changes in audience behavior give them an advantage over brands that ignore their email metrics.
Also Read: What are Core Web Vitals? How to Improve & Fix Them
Moreover, if you care about the experience and are committed to deliver the best content than it is important to continue optimize and sending a message to your subscribers.


