What is CTR? Click-Through Rates Explained

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Sep 29, 2021

0

Share

A click-through rate (CTR) is an online marketing metric used to track user engagement. Let’s review how this metric works and how you can use it to improve your marketing campaigns.

What Is a Click Through Rate (CTR)?

Your CTR measures how many people click on your campaign against how many times your campaign appears to users. 

You can measure a CTR for most digital marketing channels, but you’ll commonly use this metric to track PPC, SEO, paid social, and email campaigns. CTR works best for these campaigns because their common goal is to direct a user to a specific webpage. 

Say you’re running a PPC ad. You can easily track how many people see your ad, and how many users clicked on your ad. Here, the CTR metric is useful because you can gauge how well your ad is performing.

Your click-through rate doesn’t work in isolation. Other metrics like conversion rate and bounce rate are important to monitor too. 

How Is CTR Calculated?

Although most marketing tools will calculate your click-through rate for you, it’s easy to do yourself. To determine your campaign’s CTR, divide the number of clicks your ad received by the number of impressions your ad generated. Multiply the resulting number by 100 to determine your CTR.

CTR = (Clicks / Impressions) x 100

Say you ran an ad that generated 10 clicks from 100 impressions. Using the formula above, you’d divide 10 (number of clicks) by 100 (number of impressions). 

10 divided 100 equals 0.1. To find the CTR, we multiply 0.1 by 100, which returns 10. Your click-through rate would be 10%. 

What Affects Click-Through Rate?

1. Relevancy

Make sure your content is relevant to the channel and landing page its related to. This means that any ad, email, or campaign should have the same message as its landing page. This is not only important for your CTRs but also your bounce rate and, ultimately, conversion. 

2. Ad Rank

PPC CTR will also be affected by where your ad will show on a page (ad rank). Ad rank depends on your quality score, relevance, and the amount you’re willing to bid (CPC budget). 

3. Device 

Although it is largely out of our control, the device a user uses can affect your CTR across all channels. Typically, according to Web Marketing Pros, mobile CTRs are higher than on desktop. You can use this to your advantage by filtering your targeted audience by device if you’re on a tight budget. However, bear in mind that this is not always the case and by limiting your audience by device, you could be missing out on more clicks and customers. 

What Is the Difference Between CTR for PPC and Organic Search?

You calculate your CTR the same way across all digital marketing channels. However, you’ll interpret your CTR results differently for each channel. 

For example, organic CTR is the percentage of searchers that click on your page from the SERPs. Your clicks are largely influenced by what position your page holds on the SERP, so an organic CTR rate can tell you more about where the page ranks. 

However, a PPC ad’s CTR depends on more factors like your ad’s message, which channel you use to deliver your ad, and who your ad targets.