Marketing and audience
Click-through rate calculator
Clicks divided by impressions. How often the people who saw you chose you.
Shows how many more clicks the same impressions would need.
Click-through rate
3.4%
- Clicks needed to hit target
- 770
- Clicks per thousand impressions
- 34.02
CTR = clicks ÷ impressions
It is a ratio over the period, not an average of days
Sum the clicks, sum the impressions, divide. Do not average the daily rates: that weights a Sunday with ten impressions the same as a Monday with ten thousand.
This is why a correct CTR chart and its headline disagree. Each point is that day's ratio; the headline is the period's.
Why a falling CTR is often good
CTR falls when a page starts ranking for broader terms. More impressions at worse positions means a smaller share convert, while the page earns more clicks in total. The percentage fell and the outcome improved.
It also falls when a search engine answers the query on the results page, or when a rich result appears above you. Neither is something you did.
The case where a falling CTR is genuinely bad is when impressions and position are both steady and clicks drop. That isolates the one variable you control: what your result says.
In search, position explains most of it
Roughly half the variation in a page's search CTR is explained by where it ranks. Comparing two pages' CTRs without comparing their positions is close to meaningless.
A page at position two with a low CTR is a snippet problem: the title or the description is not answering the query somebody typed. A page at position fifteen with a low CTR is a ranking problem, and rewriting the title will not fix it.
CTR in email and ads
The same ratio, with different denominators. Email CTR is usually clicks over delivered, while click-to-open rate uses opens instead, and open tracking has been unreliable since Apple began pre-fetching images.
Ad platforms count an impression when the ad is served, whether or not it entered the viewport. Viewable CTR, where available, is the more honest number.
Questions
- How do you calculate click-through rate?
- Divide clicks by impressions and multiply by a hundred. 1,640 clicks from 48,200 impressions is a CTR of about 3.4%.
- Is a falling CTR bad?
- Often not. CTR falls when a page starts ranking for broader terms, so more impressions at worse positions convert at a lower rate while total clicks rise. It is genuinely bad only when impressions and position are steady and clicks fall.
- What is a good CTR?
- It depends almost entirely on position and context. A top search result for a branded query can exceed 30%, while position ten often sits near 1%. Compare a page against its own history and against its position, not against a published average.
- Why does my CTR headline not match the chart?
- Because each chart point is that day's ratio and the headline is the period's clicks divided by the period's impressions. Averaging the daily rates would weight a quiet day equally with a busy one.
- Can I compare CTR between two pages?
- Only alongside their positions. Roughly half the variation in search CTR is explained by rank, so a comparison that ignores position is close to meaningless.