Click through rate (CTR) is a metric that is commonly used within marketing. And it is the rate of people who clicked on a link of the total number who saw it. Further examples of where CTRs are often analysed are links on search engine result pages (SERPS), CTA-links (Call to action links), clicks on banners, emails, ads or videos.
The formula for calculating the CTR is:
Reasons to track CTR
CTR is probably one of the most important metrics to track and analyse since it tells you for example what type of ads, meta titles and descriptions, videos, content and images work best for your target audience. Analysis of your CTRs can bring you insights that help you to optimize your content for better results.
High CTRs indicate that your content and offering is highly relevant for your targeted audience. Low CTRs indicate that the content doesn’t align with the users’ expectations or is irrelevant for them.
Common variations of CTR
| Name | Descirption | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Organic CTR | This is a Click-through rate that comes from organic search engine result pages. | Google Analytics |
| Email CTR (Email marketing) | This is a Click-through rate that comes from email activities. | SAP Marketing Cloud |
| PPC CTR | This is a Click-through rate that comes from PPC (pay-per-click) activities. | Google Ads |
How can tracking CTR help you to become more data-driven?
To better understand how you can improve your CTR, have a look at the landing page reports and categorize your pages and see which had higher CTR and which had a lower. Analyse the differences and find the possible reason behind why some of the landing pages had better CTR than others. Have a look at the positionings of your landing pages and check their CTRs. Highly ranked landing pages should correlate with higher CTRs as well, check the low CTR landing pages and see how they differ from the well-performing pages.
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Additional information on CTR
- Read more about CTRs on Facebook and how to improve them
- Find out how to improve the CTRs for your banner ads
- Read more about average CTRs
- Further insights into CTR optimization