What is click-through-rate or CTR?
Click-through rate is the percentage of clicks an individual marketing collateral — like an ad or blog URL in the SERPs — receives in relation to its total number of views. It’s an effective way to measure the performance of your ads, social media posts, blog posts, and similar content.
Click-Through Rate Formula
CTR = (Total number of clicks ÷ total number of impressions) X 100
Where impressions are the number of times the target audience viewed the marketing collateral.
Here’s how this works in real-time:
Say your ad got 2,000 impressions, but only 100 people clicked on it. In that case, your CTR is:
(100 ÷ 2000) X 100 = 5%
Why Click-Through Rate Is Important
Click-through rate is important because it helps you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
A high click-through rate shows that your messaging is targeted and relevant to your audience, bringing you a step closer to converting your ideal customers. A low CTR, on the other hand, tells you that something’s not right with your marketing — either you’re targeting the wrong audience or your messaging isn’t compelling enough. It’s easier to troubleshoot the issue when you have the right data, not speculations.
Search engines like Google also depend on CTR for ad ranking, which impacts long-term ad cost and performance.
Google measures your ad’s CTR against an internal CTR estimate and stores the data for your ad account — with a corresponding quality score. As you publish new ads, your account’s historical performance data is a major factor in ranking the new ad. So, the better your historical data, the more likely that the subsequent ads will rank high in the SERPs.
How to Improve Your Click-Through Rate
To improve your CTR, ensure that your marketing materials are relevant to the audience you’re targeting. And there are several ways to do this:
Add relevant keywords to your headlines, metadata, and copy — to improve content visibility. Your keywords should be closely related to the search terms your audience would use to discover your content. Also, don’t stuff keywords in. Rather, use them in a way that fits naturally into the rest of your text.
Add a short, direct, and relevant call to action that prompts people to click. Use CTAs like:
- Click here
- Read more
- Get the free guide
Add relevant images that match your messaging.
Pro Tip: Stick to the guidelines and character limits that popular platforms and search engines provide or you risk that your title and description will be rewritten automatically and it may not include the emotive messaging, important information or call-to-action that you have intended to use in your title and description.
Here are the current meta title and description character limits for major search engines:
Google:
- Meta title character limit: 70 characters (or up to 600 pixels)
- Meta description character limit: 155 characters (or up to 920 pixels)
Bing:
- Meta title character limit: 65 characters (or up to 600 pixels)
- Meta description character limit: 155 characters (or up to 920 pixels)
Yahoo:
- Meta title character limit: 65 characters (or up to 600 pixels)
- Meta description character limit: 165 characters (or up to 968 pixels)
Click-Through Rate FAQs
Find answers to common click-through rate questions.
What is a good click-through rate?
The average organic CTR for any business is 2%. However, a good click-through rate might differ from one industry and channel to another. For example, in most industries, 2 – 5% is the acceptable range for emails. And 6 – 7% is a good click-through for search ads.
How Is Click-Through Rate Calculated?
Click-through rate is measured in percentage. It is equal to the number of clicks divided by the total number of impressions.
Click-through rate vs. open rate vs. conversion rate
Click-through rate is the number of people who view and click on a marketing collateral. It is used to determine how well your organic search results and ads are performing.
Open rate is an email marketing metric that measures how many of your subscribers opened a particular email. And conversion rate is the percentage of people who completed a specific action — like signing up for an event or purchasing a product — after clicking on an ad.
Overall, CTR is an important metric in online advertising that can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of an ad or link.
Important statistics about click-through rate
The click-through rate statistics provided below are taken from a study by Sistrix where they analyzed over 80 million keywords and search results. Here are the most important statistics about click-through rates that you should know:
- The first position in Google’s organic search results has an average click-through rate of 28.5%.
- However, the percentage drops quickly beyond position 1. In the second position, the average click rate is 15.7%, and in the third position, it’s 11%.
- Only 2.5% of people click on the result in the tenth position.
- The global CTRs across all types aren’t very useful because the CTR for position #1 varies between 13.7% and 46.9% depending on search intention and SERP layout.
- Sitelinks result in a better CTR than pure organic SERPs, with rates ranging from 46.9% to 34.2%.
- Commercial searches with a Google Shopping or Google Ads feature have the worst click-through rates of 13.7% and 18.8%, respectively.
- Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panel features also reduce organic clicks to 23.3% and 16.7%, respectively.
- Generally, a lower CTR can be expected when there are more different elements and integrations in the SERPs.
- For SEOs, this means that the search intention of a keyword defines the SERP layout and the number of organic clicks that can be targeted, and search volume alone isn’t the decisive factor.
