What is CTR?
CTR is click-through rate — the percentage of people who clicked something after seeing it, whether an ad, a search result or an email.
CTR is click-through rate — the percentage of people who clicked something after seeing it, whether an ad, a search result or an email.
Click-through rate divides clicks by impressions. An ad shown a thousand times and clicked forty has a CTR of 4%. It measures how compelling something is to the audience that saw it, which makes it a measure of relevance rather than of results.
In paid search it does double duty, because platforms use expected click-through rate as an input to ad rank. A high CTR can therefore lower what you pay for the same position, which is one of the few places in advertising where being better is directly cheaper.
In organic search, CTR describes how many people click your listing after seeing it in the results. It is influenced by your position, by your page title and description, and increasingly by whether the results page answered the question before anyone needed to click at all.
A low CTR on a well-ranked listing or a well-targeted ad usually means the wording is wrong rather than the targeting — which is the cheapest kind of problem to have.
Treating a high CTR as success. Clicks that do not convert cost money; an ad with a 12% CTR and no enquiries is efficiently attracting the wrong people.
CTR is part of paid advertising
Understanding the term is the easy half. The service page describes what the work actually involves, and the free assessment says whether it is the thing your business should be spending on next — which is frequently a different question.
Things that come up alongside it
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