What is the Click Through Rate (CTR)? How is the Click Through Rate calculated? Where can we see our CTR? What is a good CTR? Are all CTRs comparable? How to improve clicks over impressions? We tell you everything in a very simple way.
What is the Click Through Rate (CTR)?
The CTR (click through rate) is the percentage of clicks an element receives among the total number of times it appears (impressions). It is a metric that measures the interaction of users with an element, through their click interactions.
The meaning of CTR in online marketing, beyond clicks on impressions, indicates the attraction and interactions that a call to action, a link, an advertisement, a result, an image achieves… That is why it is a common metric in digital marketing.
The click through rate in online marketing has very common use in advertising campaigns, in fact, there are PPC ads (pay per click) where our budget is spent as users click, such as Google Ads.
Clicking and increasing CTR only makes sense if something happens after that interaction. For example, a click on the Google SERP (search results) converts into a visit, which in turn is a conversion opportunity. Therefore, most of the places where you click are links to other pages ( landing pages ).
Having a good CTR is not automatically synonymous with success; it is possible that we only get interaction on a link, but on the landing page, conversions are not achieved. Therefore clicking on search results, ads, email marketing, and other strategies can be an intermediate step towards conversion.
How to calculate the CTR?
The CTR is calculated by dividing the clicks by the impressions and multiplying this result by 100, to get the percentage. That is, the number of times an element has achieved an interaction per click, divided by the number of times it has appeared, multiplied by 100.
CTR= (Impressions/Clicks)*100
An example of calculating the CTR in online marketing: a Google Ads ad has appeared 600 times and we have achieved 60 clicks. The click-through-impression ratio will be 60/600 (0.01) multiplied by 100, to transform it into a percentage. That is 10% of CTR.
Where to see the CTR of a website?
To see the CTR of a website in Google searches, we can do it in Google Search Console. There we can see the CTR of the domain in searches, of a URL, and of each keyword.
A domain’s CTR appears in Search Console when you click Search Results, along with clicks, impressions, and average position. In this same report, we can make the breakdown by keywords, web pages, countries, devices…
Those clicks in Search Console represent visits to our website from the Google search engine. We can see the same in the similar tools of other search engines such as Bing, Yandex…
To see the CTR is an advertising campaign or social network, we can do it from the internal tool of each of the campaigns: Facebook Ads, Google Ads…
What is a good CTR?
A CTR is good when it is higher than the average of the general results and our particular ones. For example, in Google Search Ads, a CTR greater than 1% is considered good. In Google Display Ads (banners) a CTR greater than 0.05% is considered good. On YouTube, a CTR greater than 2% is usually considered good.
In searches, it is normal for the CTR to be higher than the banners since the user is actively searching and their focus is on the results. Videos that start on autoplay can drop CTR a lot, as they can have high impressions and few clicks, so they are often measured by other metrics.
In any case, the CTR is not good data in itself, and the click is usually the previous step to a place to receive a conversion. Therefore, CTR and CR (conversion rate) must go hand in hand. A high CTR and low CR can mean a significant loss of ad spend.
Therefore, the performance of a marketing campaign should be measured by the conversion rate, with the CTR being a very important metric to measure the progress towards said conversion. So a good CTR in digital marketing may mean nothing.
How to improve the Click Through Rate?
There are numerous strategies to improve CTR, depending on where the impression of the element is made, but all seek to attract the interest and attention of the user.
CTR increases in digital marketing. The more attention the impression can draw, the less it can go unnoticed. In general, the better positioned and larger the element that appears, the more click-through rate it will have.
If a result in Google Search is at the top (TOP1) it will have a much higher CTR than one (TOP3), basically because both will have a similar number of impressions and a very different number of clicks.
On the other hand, there is a direct relationship between competition and CTR. The greater the competition, the lower the percentage of clicks since they are distributed among the opponents. The more segmented the public is, the higher the CTR will be.
In general terms, you can increase the CTR by attracting attention with various strategies:
- Carrying out a proper segmentation.
- Getting the highlights.
- Use capital letters and emojis in the title and description.
- Using structured data to get rich snippets.
- Writing persuasive copy for the title and description.
- Using featured images that draw attention.