Understanding unique vs. total opens and clicks
You will learn
Learn how to understand the difference between unique and total opens and clicks when reviewing campaign results. In short:
- Unique opens
The number of unique recipients who opened your message. In other words, if one recipient opens your email twice, it counts as one unique open. - Unique clicks
The number of unique recipients who clicked your message. In other words, if one recipient clicks your email twice, it counts as one unique click. - Total opens*
The total number of times your message was opened. In other words, if one recipient opens your email twice, it counts as 2 total opens. - Total clicks*
The total number of times your message was clicked. In other words, if one recipient clicks your email twice, it counts as 2 total clicks.
Apple Mail and tracking opens
With the release of iOS15, macOS Monterey, iPadOS 15, and WatchOS 8, Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) changed the way that we receive open rate data on your emails by prefetching our tracking pixel. With this change, it’s important to understand that open rates will be inflated.
To see if your opens are affected, we suggest creating a custom report that includes an MPP property. You can also identify these opens in your individual subscriber segments.
For complete information on MPP opens, visit our iOS 15: How to Prepare for Apple’s Changes guide.
Open tracking and your open counts
Your open counts only include opens that Klaviyo records. If you turn off open tracking for your account, or set open tracking consent to unsubscribed for some recipients, those recipients still receive your emails but their opens are not recorded. As a result, open rate reflects a smaller share of your audience and becomes a less complete measure. Opens recorded before you turned off tracking are unaffected.
To learn how to manage these controls, see How to manage open tracking.
View a campaign's opens and clicks
The Campaigns tab shows you the open, click, and conversion data for each sent campaign. The numbers you see here are based on unique people opening, clicking, purchasing, etc.
When you click into an individual sent campaign, you will initially see the overview report for the campaign with high-level performance metrics displayed.
Unique opens and clicks
The core open and click data in the Engagement over time block represents unique opens and clicks — these numbers will match the numbers you see on the Campaigns tab front page. Unique opens and clicks reflect the number of unique recipients who opened or clicked your message.
Note that there are rare occurrences beyond Klaviyo’s control when some unique open events may not be tracked. For example, some third-party email clients and browser extensions block tracking pixels, including those that track email opens. These are the exception rather than the rule, but may impact open rates for some customers.
Total opens and clicks
At the bottom of this report, you'll see there is also data around Total Opens and Total Clicks.
These totals represent all opens and clicks recorded. For example, if one person received your campaign and opened twice, we would count two total opens. These totals will thus typically be higher than the unique counts.
If you see total open (or click) numbers that are significantly higher than unique opens (or clicks), this could signal that recipients are consistently forwarding your emails to others.
Additional resources
- Getting started with email deliverability monitoring and performance metrics
Learn what good email deliverability metrics look like by industry, and which strategies to use to help improve your email performance. In this guide, find out about the specific open and click rate, both for email campaign and flow messages, that you should strive for after depending on what vertical or industry you are in. Additionally, learn ways to help mitigate potential deliverability issues and how to continue to monitor these rates over time.
- Understanding available campaign analytics
Learn how to use Klaviyo's campaign reporting to gather insights on how your messages are performing and what happens after someone opens or clicks. Use these campaign analytics to dig deeper into website activity, checkouts started, and revenue that is directly attributabed to each message.