11 June 2026 · Journal
Open rate is not the story
If the first slide of your weekly push review is a tap percentage, you are already arguing about the wrong layer. Apieventgrid’s Signal to Send lab starts one stage earlier — sometimes two.
Open rate is a ratio. Ratios move when either side moves. Teams celebrate a rising tap rate that is actually a shrinking denominator: fewer messages rendered, same curious users tapping what remains. The chart looks like creative improvement. The catalogue is quietly dying on older Android skins.
Put three columns on the first slide
Accepted by the vendor, delivered to a device, rendered on a lock screen or notification tray. Influence — did a next action happen that would not have happened anyway — belongs on slide two, after those three columns are trusted. Taps can live in an appendix. They are not useless; they are downstream.
Most ESPs collapse delivered and rendered. That is a vendor limitation, not a reason to pretend they are identical. In class we document the gap in writing. Inventing a proxy that “estimates render” usually impresses no one in finance and confuses everyone in CRM.
A Bangkok grocery example
A Friday 11:40 lunch blast kept a stable open rate for months. When the team split the funnel, render on devices older than three Android versions had fallen hard while taps among remaining renders held. Cleaning tokens older than 120 days did more for baskets than another round of emoji testing. We tell that story in reviews because it is ordinary, not because it is heroic.
What to say in the Monday meeting
Lead with whether the message appeared. Then whether it appeared at a human hour. Then whether a next action moved versus a quiet holdout. If someone insists on open rate, show it as a diagnostic, labelled as such — never as the headline KPI for push notification performance.
If your ESP cannot expose render events, the honest first slide is a documented unknown plus a delivery column you do trust. That sentence is harder to write than a tap chart. It is also the one product will eventually thank you for.