Email campaign analytics: open rates, click rates and what they mean
Every campaign gets a report with deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes, the links people clicked and a comparison with your recent sends, explained in plain language.
What a campaign report shows
Open a sent campaign and the report starts with a plain sentence, such as how many people it went to, how many received it, how many opened it and how many clicked. Below it you find the numbers behind that sentence: Sent, Delivered, Opened, Clicked, Bounced, Unsubscribed and spam complaints.
Engagement over time
#timingAn hourly chart of opens and clicks, and a view of the first 72 hours that counts each contact once, at their first open and first click, so you can see when your list reads your email.
Compared with your recent campaigns
#contextYour open and click rate against the pooled rate of your own last sent campaigns. Test sends to fewer than 50 recipients are left out, so the comparison is with your list, not with an industry average.
Results by mailbox provider
#providersSent, delivered, opens, clicks, bounces and complaints for Gmail, Outlook and Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL, iCloud, Proton and others. A provider whose open rate is far below the rest is flagged, because the email may be landing in spam there.
Links
#linksThe web addresses people clicked, with unique and total clicks and the share of clickers each one got. Automated clicks from security scanners are counted separately and left out.
Recipients, events and opens map
#detailA searchable list of recipients with their status, a log of every delivery, open, click and bounce, and a map of where opens came from.
A/B test results
#testingWhen you split a campaign, the report compares version A and version B and marks the winner: by open rate for a subject test, by click rate for a content test.
How to read your results
Open the report
Go to Campaigns and click a campaign you have sent. A campaign that is still sending shows its progress and the numbers fill in as people engage.
Start with the Overview tab
Read the summary sentence, the stat cards and the comparison with your recent campaigns. A single campaign says little by itself; the trend over several says much more.
Look at who and where
Use the Recipients tab to filter by status (delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained), the Events tab for the full log and the Opens map tab to see where opens came from.
Check the links
In Links, see which web addresses earned the clicks. That tells you what your readers actually cared about.
Act on it
Create a segment of people who clicked or did not open, send a follow-up to the rest of an audience you limited to the most engaged, and clean up bounces in Suppressions.
How opens and clicks are measured, and their limits
An open is counted when the email's invisible tracking image loads. A click is counted when someone follows a link that passes through a tracking address before reaching your page. Both are estimates, for reasons you should know.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads images for its users automatically, so those people can show as opening an email they never read, which inflates opens. Email apps that block images do the opposite: a real reader is not counted. Gmail and Apple Mail load images through their own servers, so the location shown for those opens is the provider's, not the reader's. Locations are approximate, at city level.
Hemero filters what it can: clicks from link scanners and previews, the security tools that follow every link in an email, are recorded as automated and never counted as clicks or opens, which is why the click rate is a firmer number than the open rate. Treat opens as a direction, not a headcount, and judge a campaign mainly by clicks and by what people did next.
What it costs
Reports are included in every plan with no feature limits. Plans start at $19 a month for 25,000 emails; see pricing. If you want to ask questions about a report in plain language, the AI assistant can read your campaign results and summarize them.
Honest limits
No revenue tracking
Reports cover what happens in the email: delivery, opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. For visits and sales, tag your links with UTM parameters in the campaign's Advanced options and read the results in your own analytics.
Location is approximate
Placing an open on the map depends on the IP address it came from, which is often a provider's server.
Numbers arrive over time
Opens and clicks keep coming in for days after a send, so a report keeps changing for a while.
Questions
What is a good open rate and click rate?
There is no honest single number, because opens are inflated or hidden by privacy features and every list is different. Compare each campaign with your own recent ones, which the report does for you, and focus on clicks.
Why does my open rate look so high?
Some email apps, Apple Mail Privacy Protection in particular, load tracking images automatically, which counts as an open even when nobody reads the email. Click rate is less affected.
Are clicks from security scanners counted?
No. Clicks and opens from link scanners and previews are recorded as automated and left out of your numbers. The Links section tells you how many were excluded.
Can I see which links got the most clicks?
Yes. The Links section lists the addresses people clicked with their unique and total clicks, most clickers first.
Can I see who opened or clicked?
Yes. The Recipients tab shows each recipient's status, the Events tab logs every open and click, and each contact's page lists their own activity. You can also build a segment from campaign activity.
Can I test two subject lines?
Yes. In a campaign's Advanced options you can run an A/B test of the subject or the content. The report compares both versions and marks the winner.
Ready to see how your emails perform? Create an account, send a campaign and read your first report.