What is CTR?
Click-through rate, the percentage of people who clicked after seeing your ad or search listing.
CTR = (Clicks / Impressions) x 100
A worked example
Your search ad is shown 15,000 times and receives 450 clicks, giving a CTR of 3 per cent. On a Meta feed placement the same 3 per cent would be exceptional; on a branded search term it would be poor. Context decides whether a CTR is good.
Why it matters
CTR is best understood as a diagnostic rather than a goal. It tells you whether your message matched the intent of the person who saw it, which is genuinely useful information, but chasing it directly produces worse outcomes, because the easiest way to raise CTR is to promise something the landing page does not deliver.
On Google Ads, CTR feeds Quality Score, which affects both your ad rank and what you pay per click. A higher CTR on a relevant term genuinely lowers costs. That is a real mechanism and worth optimising for, within the constraint that the click has to convert.
The most useful way to read CTR is alongside conversion rate. High CTR with low conversion means a promise mismatch. The ad is writing cheques the landing page does not honour. Low CTR with high conversion means you are reaching the right people but not enough of them, usually a targeting or creative problem rather than an offer problem.
The nuance most people miss
CTR is only comparable within the same placement and intent level. Branded search routinely runs above 10 per cent because people are searching for you by name; that number tells you almost nothing about performance. Display and discovery placements often run below 0.5 per cent and are not failing. Comparing a Meta Reels CTR to a Google Search CTR is comparing two unrelated things.
Common mistakes
- Treating CTR as a success metric rather than a diagnostic signal
- Comparing CTR across placements or intent levels with very different baselines
- Writing clickbait ad copy that lifts CTR and destroys conversion rate
- Including branded search in an account-level CTR average, which flatters everything else