Email click stats shows 0s for emails that have clicks

[dzver]

Quick summary

The email clicks consistently shows 0% even for emails that have a non-trivial number of clicks and are clearly not at 0%.

Steps to reproduce

Visit the stats for veselin.blog

1. Visit https://wordpress.com/stats/subscribers/veselin.blog - all emails have 0% CTR
2. Check the individual emails - they actually have clicks. Having 7 clicks with 129 recepients and 42 opens doesn't result into a 0% CTR
3. https://wordpress.com/stats/email/clicks/day/5558/veselin.blog this email shows as 0.8% in the summary and 1% in the details. 7/129 is 4.6%, and 7/30 is 23.3% - it's simply never 0%, 0.8%, or 1%, no matter how I calculate it.

What you expected to happen

Email stats to show actual numbers, exact clicks rather than %s

What actually happened

0s and wrong %s

Impact

Some (< 50%)

Available workarounds?

No but the platform is still usable

If the above answer is "Yes...", outline the workaround.

Flagging that some users are impacted because this only affects users with email subscribers.

Platform (Simple and/or Atomic)

No response

Logs or notes

No response

[github-actions]

This issue could use some more labels, to help prioritize and categorize our work. Could you please add at least a [Type], a [Feature], and a [Pri] label?

[Robertght]

I'm able to replicate this with the latest couple of posts from my self-hosted environment too.

@Automattic/red @Automattic/jetpack-bebop is this something one of you can look into?

[a8ck3n]

I had a quick look at this one. I believe the clicks_rate is defined here:

fbhepr%2Skers%2Sjcpbz%2Schoyvp.ncv%2Serfg%2Sjcpbz%2Qwfba%2Qraqcbvagf%2Spynff.jcpbz%2Qfgngf%2Qncv%2Qraqcbvagf.cuc%3Se%3Q9618so2o%231321-og

The click rate value in decimal format, result of total_clicks / total_sends.

So yeah, it does look like there is an error in the data returned from the API call. The numbers I'm seeing don't quite match what you noted, which is also odd. I'm seeing 125 opens and 7 clicks for that post. So…5.6%?

I'll try and circle back on this next week when I'm back from AFK but it will depend on the backlog from our current projects.

[a8ck3n]

View email clicks rate by post. Returns mock data.

Hmm…maybe I'm looking in the wrong spot. Either way, will give it another look next week.

[a8ck3n]

Looped in Zap before moving forward with this one.

p1734618654975259-slack-C052XEUUBL4

[lezama]

#97729 adds two decimal places and tooltips to the rates for better clarity.

One potential issue is that, for posts published before August 2023, we don’t have unique counts. Since rates are calculated using unique counts, we need to consider how to display rates for those posts.

[lezama]

TL;DR: Posts without links in the content don’t have unique clicks recorded, so the click rate is shown as 0 for these.

I’ve been investigating the email clicks issue, and here are my findings so far, along with some points that may not be clear to users:

Previously, we displayed Total clicks in the stats. Now, we calculate and display Click rate, which are derived from unique clicks.

Data Storage

• Unique clicks are stored in the email_link_stats table. However, this table is designed to record clicks for links in the email content, not for clicks on the post title.

• Total clicks, on the other hand, are leveraged from the wpcom_email_click tracks event. Then stored in the email_stats_daily_ table after being parsed from logs.

To make it even more complicated, we record wpcom_email_click events in different parts of the code depending if it's a click in the post title or not.

For clicks on post titles in emails, this is the backtrace for when this event is triggered:

[0] => wp-content/lib/tracks/class.wpcom-tracks-client.php:62
[1] => wp-content/lib/tracks/client.php:32
[2] => wp-content/mu-plugins/groovemails.php:282

For clicks on non-post-title links we also record wpcom_email_click, but with a different backtrace:

[0] => wp-content/lib/tracks/class.wpcom-tracks-client.php:62
[1] => wp-content/lib/class.wpcom-user-content-links.php:292

These discrepancies in how clicks are tracked and stored likely contribute to the confusion and inconsistencies in the reported stats. cc @Automattic/zap @crisbusquets