Does open rate include clicked emails?

Good question!

Sounds like Autumn should say something here.

You can have a click but not an open in case someone does not load images but clicks nonetheless. "Open" is a flawed statistic anyways, so I think it's best that Marketo calculates this in the industry-standard way, so it's easier to compare to average open rates in your industry. 

Jep

As Jep said, No, a click doesn't mean an open. An open is specifically tracked by the downloading of a 1x1 blank pixel from Marketo's server. When that file is downloaded, it's counted as an open. So if the lead looks at your email with images disabled and then clicks a link, it'll track a click, but not an open. Which you can see if you ever have a CTO above 100%.

Jep, an employee previously indicated opens count as clicks.  Would you clarify?

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PRzLAAW

We've built some intelligence in the email reports (both in MLM and Email Analysis) to count an open when a lead clicks on a link.  Please refer to Steven's url for more info.

That said, we do not log an "open" in the activity log item, even after the lead clicks on the email, because the downloading of the 1x1 pixel did not actually happen.

TJ

Thanks for clarifying TJ

Thanks TJ. When the champions rabblerouse about needing a greater visibility into improvements, this is a great example!  This has been something for the 4 years I've been working with Marketo has always been understood, they don't equal each other. You guys wrote a bugfix into the report to ensure that you don't get 200% CTO results, which is great, but if there could be some way that we could know about that, it would really help out.

I just went and did a spot check and I no longer have any CTOs over 100%, which was common before, especially with very small batch campaigns. We appreciate the continual improvements, but perhaps if something like the Support Blog could deliver a quick update to my RSS feed when someone throws out a brilliant bugfix like this, we'd all be a lil better off.

Thanks again for the clarification and the continuous improvement.

Thanks for the feedback, Adam.  I've shared this with the team and we'll continue to explore options to increase visibility.

TJ