Date First Published: 25th September 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Advertising
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 5/10
Learn more about what click-through rate is in this article.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of visitors that click on an online advertisement and are directed to the advertiser's website. If a user interacts with an advertisement, they are 'clicking through' and leaving the publisher's website. Click-through rate is an important measurement for advertisers as it determines how well their campaigns are performing and for publishers, it determines how successful their selling of ads is.
A high click-through rate suggests that advertisers are reaching the right audience and are successfully generating traffic to their website, whilst a low click-through rate suggests that people are not interested in their ads or they are not using language persuasively enough to convince people to click. For publishers, the higher the CTR, the more revenue they will generate on a PPC model.
Click-through rate can be calculated using this formula:
Number of click-throughs ÷ number of impressions x 100
For example, if a page had 5000 impressions and an ad got 75 click-throughs, it would be calculated by:
75 ÷ 5000 x 100 = 1.5% click-through rate
An impression is counted each time an ad is displayed to a visitor regardless of whether the ad is clicked through.
The average click-through rate is around 1%. That might sound tiny, but usually, only a very small percentage of visitors click on an ad displayed on a website, an app, or in the search results. Above 5% is a good click-through rate to achieve. If an advertiser or a publisher can achieve a click-through rate of over 10%, that is excellent. Ads need to attract thousands of visitors a day for publishers to receive good advertising revenue and for advertisers to generate good website traffic.
Click-through rate can also refer to the percentage of people that click on a search result when entering specific keywords. This is known as organic click-through rate. Google Search Console informs webmasters of the click-through rate of specific queries that their website is ranking for. It is calculated in the same way as clicks on ads. The higher their site comes up in the search results, the higher the chances of someone clicking through, which means leaving the SERP page and visiting their website. However, if a site ranks low for all of its keywords and is on the last page, the click-through rate is likely to be very low.
Click-through rate is not a ranking factor for search engines, such as Google and Bing, but can help to determine whether users are interested in their pages. Click-through rate is also not a reliable metric to rank pages in the SERP as it can be easily manipulated. For example, if search engines did use it as a ranking factor, someone could constantly click through a search result and then go back over and over again to increase the click-through rate and boost the ranking of a page. Be wary of any studies that link click-through rate with search engine rankings or say that a higher click-through rate will cause Google or other search engines to push a search result up.
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