Click through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) is a marketing metric that compares the number of times people click on your content to the number of impressions received. This can include the rate at which somebody clicked on an ad, clicked through to your website from search engine results, and many other applications. Ultimately the goal of measuring your CTR is to determine how effective your content is at getting a user to take the desired action, i.e. click through to the next step in the marketing funnel.

CTR is calculated simply as the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions for a given time period. For example, if you have 1000 impressions and 30 clicks, the CTR is 3%. In general, a high CTR is a good indicator that your ads or content has effective copy and/or creative that resonates with the target audience.

There are many applications of CTR in marketing, for example a few of the most common use cases include:

• CTR on PPC (pay-per-click) ads
• CTR in organic search engines (SEO)
• Email CTR
• On-site CTR (i.e. buttons, etc)

In each of these examples, CTR is an important metric that helps you understand what’s working with your marketing and what needs improvement. For example, if you launch an ad campaign with various iterations of marketing copy, CTR will tell you which one had the highest impact on driving the desired action, assuming all other creative and targeting stay the same. Similarly, in other forms of marketing such as email or SEO, CTR can help you determine your most profitable subject lines, call-to-actions (CTAs), and more.

In terms of what a good CTR is, this will depend largely on the type of marketing you’re doing. For example, display ads typically have a much lower CTR than search ads. That said, as HubSpot highlights “across all industries, the average CTR for a search ad is 1.91%, and 0.35% for a display ad.”

Google provides a useful tip for how to use CTR to improve your marketing:

You can use CTR to gauge which ads, listings, and keywords are successful for you and which need to be improved. The more your keywords, ads, and listings relate to each other and to your business, the more likely a user is to click on your ad or listing after searching on your keyword phrase.

CTR is an essential metric that is applicable to nearly every marketer. In order to help marketers improve the performance of their CTR and marketing campaigns in general, Singular provides marketing analytics with accurate, timely, and actionable insights across multiple channels. By tracking and analyzing cross-channel metrics like CTR, this helps marketers determine their most profitable channels with ROI insights.

Singular also allows marketers to visualize their ad creatives and performance, including ROI, CTR, and much more, side-by-side. By taking a holistic and cross-platform approach to marketing analytics, this helps marketers improve their performance over time and increase the ROI of their marketing efforts.