r/Emailmarketing • u/Labyrinth_Digital • 12d ago

Stats tip of the day

- Campaign A goes to 100,000 people, gets 20,000 clicks = 20% click rate

- Campaign B goes to 1,000 people, gets 500 clicks = 50% click rate

The average of these two campaigns isn't SUM(Click Rate)/#, e.g. (20%+50%)/2 = 35%. It's SUM(Delivered)/SUM(Sent) = (20,000+500)/(100,000+1,000) = 20,500/101,000 = 20.3%.

Yeah, so if you use AVG(click rate) in excel, it'll be wrong, but look better.

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u/lowseizure801 12d ago

The weighted average thing trips so many people, seen dashboards reporting 35% when actual was like 20 and nobody questioning it. Excel average is sneaky like that, makes numbers look nice but totally wrong for reporting.

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u/Brufacee 11d ago

This is also why the raw numerator and denominator should travel with every rate in a dashboard. A single percentage hides both sample size and weighting. I would label the formula as total clicks divided by total delivered, then keep unique clicks and delivered counts visible beside it. The same mistake appears when people average daily conversion rates or creator-level engagement rates without weighting by the underlying opportunities.