Reading Your Metrics (Open Rate, Click Rate, and What They Actually Mean)

For years, open rate was the number everyone checked first. It's still the number most dashboards put at the top of the page, in the biggest font, above everything else. It's also, by 2026, one of the least trustworthy numbers in your entire report, and if you're still treating it the way people treated it in 2019, you're making decisions based on noise dressed up as data.