Click-through rate
CTR / clickthrough rate
Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your ad and clicked it, worked out as clicks divided by impressions. Google gives the example of 5 clicks from 100 impressions being a 5 percent rate. It measures interest in the ad, not whether the click was worth anything.
Click-through rate answers one narrow question: of the people who saw the ad, how many clicked it. Google describes it as a ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it, and gives the formula as clicks divided by impressions. Five clicks from 100 impressions is 5 percent. Microsoft documents the identical formula, written as clicks divided by impressions times 100, with its own example of 50 clicks from 2,348 impressions giving 2.13 percent.
This is one of the rare metrics where the two big platforms genuinely agree, so a rate from one can be read next to a rate from the other.
What a good rate looks like is a different matter, and the honest answer is that there is no universal number. Google says directly that a good click-through rate is relative to what you are advertising and on which networks. An ad for an emergency plumber at midnight and an ad for office furniture are not competing for the same kind of attention, and their rates should not match.
It is not only a report line. Google says it feeds your keyword's expected click-through rate, which is one component of Ad Rank, so a consistently ignored ad can end up costing you position as well as clicks.
In practice
An ad is shown 10,000 times and clicked 250 times. That is a 2.5 percent click-through rate. Now suppose the headline promises free delivery and the page does not offer it. The rate could climb to 4 percent while the money situation gets worse, because every extra click is somebody arriving, feeling misled, and leaving. A rising click-through rate is not automatically good news.
Not the same as
- Conversion rate
- Click-through rate stops at the click. Conversion rate measures what happened after it.
- Impression share
- Click-through rate is about how many people clicked. Impression share is about how often you appeared at all.
Why it matters to you
A low click-through rate usually means the ad is not speaking to the search, which is a writing and targeting problem rather than a budget problem. A high one paired with no inquiries usually means the ad promises something the landing page does not deliver. Read the two rates together or the number will mislead you.
What to ask or check
- 01What is the click-through rate per ad, not just the campaign average?
- 02Does the ad promise anything the landing page does not deliver?
- 03Are clicks and inquiries moving together, or has the rate risen while inquiries stayed flat?
What people get wrong
That a higher click-through rate is always an improvement. A misleading headline raises it and costs you money on every click it wins.
Red flags
- A report that shows click-through rate rising while inquiries stay flat, presented as progress.
- A very small click count treated as a trend. Microsoft states that clicks can also come from other sources, giving spiders, robots and test servers as examples.
Where we fit
Running Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts is one of the things we sell. Settings and figures like this one are part of that work, in an account that stays in your name.
See how we do it