What is CTR? And how to improve the clickthrough rate?
One of the most important metrics in Digital Marketing is CTR — or Clickthrough Rate.
CTR is a metric that determines the impact of your CTAs within the campaigns you launch. Tracking it is essential to understand if your efforts are really yielding results.
There are several ways to analyze CTR since it is not an independent metric. It will always be tied to a specific campaign.
And since there are different campaigns, as well as different offers, analyzing CTR is usually done on an individual level.
But of course: all actions and adjustments inform others, successively, as it should be in digital marketing.
Today’s topic is CTR. Let’s discuss its main concerns and also analyze actions that need good CTRs to perform well.
Shall we begin?
What is CTR?
CTR stands for Clickthrough Rate.
It indicates how many people clicked on a specific CTA within a campaign.
Let’s go for a quick example: you send an email, and in that email, you include a button for the person to click and take advantage of the offer you are providing.
The CTR of this email will indicate how many people actually clicked on that button.
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For this calculation to be made, it is also necessary to analyze the email’s open rate, in this specific case.
In some other campaigns, it is also necessary to analyze some other metrics to better inform the CTR calculation, which we will analyze below.
But to summarize: CTR indicates how many people clicked on your offer and engaged with what you are offering.
The next metric for analysis, within this same axis, is CRO. It will indicate how many people are actually converting on your business goals, not just clicking on your CTAs.
How to calculate CTR
To reach CTR, you need to do the following calculation:
(Number of impressions / number of clicks) X 100
The information that makes up this calculation will vary greatly depending on the analysis you are doing.
“Impressions” is related to your efforts on Google Ads and Social Ads. This metric indicates the number of people who received your ads.
But it doesn’t apply to email marketing, for example. In this case, it doesn’t matter much how many people your emails were delivered to, but how many people opened your email.
Of course, with some caveats: you need to know if your email is reaching your leads. If it’s not, then the problem is much deeper.
Due to these small differences in analysis, I have separated below how to closely monitor CTR in the campaigns where it is most necessary.
In what types of campaigns is it important to evaluate CTR?
You will need to analyze CTR in campaigns that have clickable CTAs. This is the basic universal point for CTR.
This goes even beyond digital marketing. For example: if you put up a billboard with a QR Code in the middle of the city, analyzing CTR is analyzing how many people scanned the QR Code.
And the calculation, in this case, will analyze the estimated average number of people who see your billboard divided by the people who scanned the QR Code.
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It applies to any occasion, as long as there is an action that your prospect, lead, or customer needs to take. In the end, CTR is less about “clicks” and more about the completion of that action.
But within digital marketing, there are some types of campaigns where CTR gains huge prominence, becoming the main analysis metric.
Let’s talk about them below. Come with me:
Email is one of the actions that most needs constant CTR analysis, mainly because it needs people to click on your CTAs to be effective.
Calculating CTR in email marketing is done by dividing the number of opened emails by the number of people who clicked on the CTA.
That is: how many people opened the email and still clicked on the offer you provided. This first metric is the open rate.
The open rate itself has a significant influence on the CTR of email marketing, but when you deal with metrics in percentage form, it can be difficult to analyze the absolute results.
For example: your CTR is at 7% in an email campaign. Great! But how many people clicked?
In the case of emails, which deal with fewer people than Social Ads, for example, knowing these absolute numbers is important to stay on top of what is really happening.
SEO
In SEO work, CTR will indicate how many people are clicking on your conversion opportunities on your site and blog.
On the site, we can think of some simple conversion opportunities:
- How many people engaged with your chatbot to generate leads;
- How many people clicked on your “test now” button;
- How many people clicked on any button, really;
- How many people interacted with a presentation video;
- How many people clicked on your pricing page;
In short: how many people clicked on any conversion opportunity offered by your site.
In the case of blogs, it’s the same thing, but now with an extra feature that goes well with the format: banners.
We need to measure the CTR of these banners to know which materials receive the most clicks during reading. This way, we can understand if the strategy of adding banners is viable.
And also for comparison. By the way, this is a very important point of CTR: the ability to measure what is working with what is not, and then make adjustments.
Paid Media
In paid media, it is very important to measure the CTR of any campaign on any channel.
In fact, this measurement, as simple as it is, comes with an extra: you keep an eye on everything that is happening in your campaigns and can catch small issues that you wouldn’t catch if you just left them there.
To measure CTR in paid media, simply divide the number of impressions your ad had by the number of clicks.
Important: impressions are different from reach. This second metric, very present on Facebook and Instagram, indicates how many unique people were impacted by an ad.
That is, how many accounts saw your ad.
For CTR, what matters are the Impressions. They will indicate how many times your ad appeared to users, whether just once or ten times.
We measure it this way because part of the work of paid media is to expose people to ads until they click. And most of the time, they won’t click as soon as the ad appears.
What are good CTR values?
We’ve been discussing the importance of CTR and how to calculate it, two more operational parts of digital marketing, right?
But how exactly do you know if your CTR is good? Are there rates that determine if it is good or bad?
Well, it is always good to think from the specific side first, before generalizing. The ideal CTR for your brand is the one that is trending upwards.
CTR percentages are very volatile depending on the conversion rate of each market segment.
In the 2024 Lead Generation Panorama, for example, we found completely different conversion values among the almost 20 sectors we analyzed.
That is: if the conversion rate is different in each segment, CTR will also be, since to convert your prospect first needs to click on what is being offered.
Because of this volatility, it is better to analyze trends and set a goal to find the ideal CTR for your market.
However, looking at the percentages themselves, we can get a more generalized idea of your clickthrough rate:
🔴 Between 0% and 1% — a rate considered poor, indicating that, on average, your ads are not being clicked enough. This applies to any campaign, on any channel, and even outside of paid media. It’s a red alert situation!
🟡 Between 1% and 5% — a rate considered average. You are not on alert, but the closer you are to 1%, the more important it will be to seek alternatives to improve your CTR. Don’t worry, we will discuss this further in this article.
🟢 5% and above — a rate considered good, and when it surpasses double digits, it is considered excellent. But such rates are rare and usually indicate highly necessary materials for the lead.
In any case, what really matters is studying your segment and your operation to understand what CTRs are most suitable for your specific reality, okay?
But speaking of analyzing metrics and how CTR fits into your strategies, we also need to quickly talk about another topic.
Is CTR a vanity metric?
No, CTR cannot be considered a vanity metric by any means.
But there are situations where just analyzing CTR is not enough. We already talked about one of them a little while ago: the case of emails and their open rate.
Let’s suppose your CTR is at 10%: great, right? But as you can see, this is a percentage.
And this percentage is built on the ratio between the number of people who opened the email and the number of people who clicked on at least one link inside it, right?
So: how many people opened the email? If it was only 10 and you sent it to a base of 1000 people, just knowing the CTR is not enough: the open rate hindered the results of this campaign.
If only 10 people opened the email, one of them clicked on the link. But if 200 people had opened it, the CTR percentage wouldn’t change much — 20 people would have clicked on the link.
So, it’s not that CTR is a vanity metric. In fact, I don’t even believe that vanity metrics exist.
What exists are metrics that perfectly explain some situations but don’t explain others.
In other words: “vanity metrics” are another name for metrics that are inadequate for that moment and that specific measurement.
How to optimize CTR for each type of campaign
Well, now that we’ve talked more about CTR in various types of campaigns, we also need to discuss how to improve it in each of them.
This is also quite an abstract task. Nothing in digital marketing is exact, precisely because digital marketing is not an exact science.
It only becomes exact when you are dealing with data. So, the first suggestion to improve your CTR is to capture and organize this data.
The data are the CTRs themselves of all the campaigns you run. To start improving it, it is essential to understand if it is increasing, decreasing, or stationary.
If you don’t have this data yet, you can already put all the tips below into practice, but don’t expect immediate results — you are gathering data.
Now, if you already have the information you need, you can go straight to applying the points we will look at together now.
Come with me:
CTR in email is determined by clicks on links or buttons present in it.
So, the first tip to improve it is to increase the opportunities.
It is quite common to find emails with article – article – article – button – article. Everyone already knows this structure; there is no curiosity.
This is my offer. If you liked it, click on this button. It’s all so standard that the person will only click if they are really interested in the offer.
This is the biggest problem with low CTR in emails: they don’t spark the curiosity of those who are reading and receiving the offer.
The best solution is to invest heavily in good copywriting so that your email sparks this curiosity and includes other resources that will also stimulate it.
Links to research published on your blog that complement your offer. Links at the end with related products. Multiple CTAs, spread throughout the email and at least one before the first fold.
These are simple points but they greatly change the situation of low CTR in email. But by far, what helps the most is really the copywriting.
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SEO
Speaking of blogs, the best way to increase CTR is to offer more conversion opportunities.
Remembering that, in the case of a site, CTR is indicated by the number of people who clicked on at least one of your links.
This is similar to what we understand as a bounce rate: people who leave the site without clicking on anything. They read and leave.
Because of this characteristic, everything is a link on a site. Services page, pricing, products, categories: everything is a link.
If the person does not click on any link, your CTR will drop. It’s natural.
It is important to analyze why they are not clicking on these links, banners, and conversion opportunities to increase CTR. They usually include:
- The site’s usability is low;
- The links are hard to find;
- The menus are not attractive;
- The blog has few banners;
- There is no chatbot installed;
- The site’s copy is not optimized;
- The site is generally very slow;
Among other more specific issues related to your site’s reality.
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Search Ads
Search network ads are the most popular Google Ads format. They are those sponsored results that appear before the first positions in the search engine.
They have their own features. Every search network ad consists of:
- Title;
- URL;
- Descriptive subtitle.
The format is very limiting, so understanding CTR in these ads becomes simpler. One of these points has a problem. You just need to find out which one!
Social Ads
Social Ads are more complex than Search Network ads, mainly because they involve media.
And it is precisely in these media — and in the caption that accompanies the ads — where the danger lies.
A good creative can greatly increase your CTR. But an inadequate creative does the opposite, and with much more force.
The only way to keep your Social Ads with good CTRs is by testing. Avoid running ads in a single version; always do A/B tests to understand which creative had the best results.
You can always check your competitor ads using Meta’s Ad Library. It’s free, but a little limited.
I hope this article has helped you better understand what CTR is and how it is applied to the various functionalities of your digital marketing!
One of the best ways to increase this CTR is by working with Conversational Marketing.
Through its personalization, you can achieve much higher click rates on your site, as the approach becomes proactive.
That’s the approach we use here at Leadster and it has always given us great results. You deserve them too.
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