CTR

What is the CTR?

CTR, or Click-Through Rate, is the impressions to clicks ratio. It is calculated this way:

Impressions / clicks * 100

A ratio showing how often people who see your ad or free product listing end up clicking it. Clickthrough rate (CTR) can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads, and free listings, are performing.

• CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 5%.
• Each of your ads, listings, and keywords have their own CTRs that you can see listed in your account.
• A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads and listings helpful and relevant. CTR also contributes to your keyword’s expected CTR, which is a component of Ad Rank. Note that a good CTR is relative to what you’re advertising and on which networks.
• 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.

The average CTR is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.  If a row of data has no impressions, the CTR will be shown as a dash (-) because CTR would be division by zero.

What’s a good CTR?

With CTR, specifically, the idea of a ‘good’ CTR generally depends on a lot of different factors. when looking at the state of organic CTR, Backlinko found some rather interesting information:

• 31.7% was the average CTR for the top result in Google search;
• The top 3 results get around 75% of all clicks;
• The average CTR starts dropping significantly from the 5th result down.

You can use the 31.7% CTR as a good benchmark to analyze your current efforts, even if you’re not at the top of the search queries yet. For comparison, here are the average organic CTRs for the top 5 links:

• 31.73%
• 24.71%
• 18.66%
• 13.60%
• 9.51%

If your organic CTR is around 6-9%, you’re generally doing a decent job at making users click on your links. But, of course, there’s always room for improvement.

How to interpret the CTR?

The higher your CTR is better because you’re converting people from search results to your website.

You can influence the average click-through rate (CTR) by:

• Modifying the title tag
• Modifying Meta Description
• Adding structured data to your page
• Building brand recognition
• Updating the favicon on your site
• and more…

Finding Click Through Rate Data

How do you get CTR numbers and how do you know what your click through rate is? The answer is Google Search Console. It provides all these numbers for you and it’s free to sign up.

Once you’ve logged into Search Console, in order to get any type of click-through rate data, you have to go to Search Analytics and click on that.

That will bring up the default set of data which is going to be focused on clicks and queries. 

Clicking on the CTR box will show an aggregate CTR trend line and you can also look at the aggregate CTR value (for all the pages on the site). What’s more helpful is if you scroll down,  scroll to the rightmost column and look at CTR data on a page by page basis.

If you want to benchmark data, you can pick a particular date range – there are a couple presets – or you can do custom if you want to look at the click-through rate for a particular month, for example.

You can add filters for country, filters by device – that may give you some insights into where you’re underperforming on a geographic or device basis and then that may inform the way that you run tests.

You can export data into an Excel-friendly CSV by scrolling down to the bottom of the page and clicking “Download.”

How To Use CTR Data

Now that you know your click-through rates, what to do with this information? Obviously a higher click-through rate is better because the higher the click-through rate the more traffic you’ll get but the question becomes how do you improve the click through rate?

1. Improving CTR with Titles & Metas. You can actually influence a click through rate without being ranked better at all is to tweak the title tag and the meta description. 
2. Testing Different Optimizations. Meta description tests you may want to run might include different CTAs and different language that are more actionable. Benchmarking performance data will allow you to compare different optimizations over time and see which one had a higher click through rate.

CTR: Branded vs. Non-Branded

Also worth noting that click-through rate can be looked at in a lot of different ways depending on the type of keyword. For example we know that branded keywords are going to have a much higher click through rate. If someone is searching for a particular brand they’re more likely to click on that than they are a more generic keyword.

CTR Based On Funnel Position

Keywords in different parts of the funnel are also likely to have different CTR. Keywords that have words like ‘cost’ or ‘signup’ in them – these searchers have likely done their research and they’re ready to buy. Consequently, they’re probably more inclined to click on a search results because of that.

How to boost your organic CTR?

• Trusting Google – users intrinsically trust the 1st link to be relevant to the search queries, since they know Google focuses a lot on the accuracy of its search results;
• Brand recognition – users might click on a link, even if it’s not no.1 simply because they know or have heard of a brand before;
• Reading between the links – lastly, users may rely on headlines and meta information to see if a particular link might be useful for them.

Considering these factors, it stands to reason that the ways to achieve a higher CTR would be a combination of digital marketing efforts that will simply make your URLs a.more visible and b.more convincing.

Here are a few ways to do just that:

1. Have a Good SEO Strategy

Search engine optimisation is one of the best ways to achieve a high CTR. the higher your URLs rank in the search results, the more likely target audiences will click on them to visit your site.

SEO is a long-term effort that includes a variety of moves, such as:

• Content marketing
• Link building
• On-page SEO optimisation (such as improving page load speed)
• Improving user experience, etc.

Average CTR for the top three results gather the better bulk of all clicks from a SERP, so focusing on SEO is simply the best way to improve your CTR.

2. Target the Right Keywords and Make Them Visible

Target keywords your audiences use in their search queries and try your best to make them visible on the SERPs. When a user sees the keywords in the headline, description, or even the URLs themselves, it serves as a reinforcement your page is relevant to what they are searching, making it more likely for them to click on it. Be sure to target a combination of keywords as well, such as location keywords or long tails to ensure you’re ending up on the right SERPs.

3. Focus on the Meta Information

People often give more attention to the content that’s on the page, than the metadata of the page. However, Google will use title tags and meta description to accompany URLs in the search results.

And these extra descriptions can help you convince a user to click on your link. Consider them as opportunities to:

• Provide more information
• Make them curious
• Give them an incentive to click