What is CTR (Click-through Rate) in Marketing?

CTR (Click-through Rate) is the ratio of the number of clicks (how many people clicked on the link) to the number of impressions (how many people saw the content).

The CTR metric can be used in multiple contexts, for example:

• Organic CTR will be the ratio of how many times people clicked on your site to how many times your site appeared in the search. You can check the organic CTR for Google search in the Google Search Console as shown in the screenshot below.

• CTR in the affiliate marketing context will be the ratio of how many times people bought products from your affiliate links to how many times people clicked on your affiliate links.

CTR is an important metric when it comes to paid ads. It tells you if your ad is performing well enough or the ad needs some improvements.

How CTR is calculated

A general formula for calculating CTR would be (clicks ÷ impressions) x 100.

Let’s take an example, if 10,000 people see your website coming up in the search results and only 500 people click on it then by the above formula, the CTR would be 5%.

Another example in the context of affiliate marketing would be, if 500 people clicked on your affiliate link but only 10 people bought something then CTR would be 2%.

Why CTR is an important metric

If your website is ranking at the top and still people click on the 2nd or 3rd results then there is something wrong with your meta title and description. Monitoring the CTR data can help you bring more visitors to the site.

Here are some reasons why you must measure CTR metric for your business:

• Helps you understand if people are clicking after coming across your website
• Gives you insights if you should improve your copy or optimize your website
• Helps you understand what your customers are interested in — what works and what doesn’t work
• On the basis of CTR data, you can run A/B tests to further optimize the content
• Analyzing the CTR data properly for running paid ads can help you reduce the costs

Final words

A simple change in the meta title and meta description can magically boost your CTR. In fact, Larry Kim found out that high CTR pages do get a ranking boost in the search.

Monitoring and improving your CTR can bring more visitors to your website from search engines and/or save you a lot of money if you’re running paid ads.