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.

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.

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

• Learn more about opens and clicks in How to monitor email deliverability performance
• Find out about analyzing your campaigns in Understanding available campaign analytics