Open rate
The share of a newsletter's recipients recorded as having opened it — an increasingly unreliable number.
Open tracking works by loading a pixel. Apple Mail Privacy Protection, on by default since 2021, loads that pixel for every message whether or not the recipient reads it, which inflates open rates on lists with many Apple Mail users and makes cross-publisher comparison close to meaningless.
Click rate has become the more honest newsletter metric, and the one worth asking for. A publisher who leads with open rate and will not share click rate is telling you something.
Terms it depends on
- Media kit
- The pack a publisher sends advertisers: audience size, demographics, formats, rates and past campaigns.
- Click-through rate
- Clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage.
- Impression
- One instance of an ad being served — not necessarily seen, and not necessarily by a person.