Click-through-rate or CTR is the performance metric that digital marketers use to measure the effectiveness of a Pay-per-click (PPC) ad, organic result on the search engine results page (SERP), email marketing campaigns and call-to-action (CTA) button on the landing page.
Basically, it is a ratio of the number of people who have clicked on a specific link versus the number of times it has been viewed (impressions). Click-through-rate also tells the marketers about the reaction of people for specific ads and keywords. To view the CTR of a PPC ad, you can check your PPC account dashboard where you can see all the metrics of your ad campaign. To find the CTR of your site’s organic search result, you can use Google Search Console or Bing webmaster tool. Both these tools can help you in finding the average CTR of your site or web page for a particular search engine.
How CTR is Calculated
Calculating the CTR is quite simple, just divide the total number of clicks by the number of impressions then multiply it by 100. For instance, if your web page gets 2 clicks and 100 impressions, it means that the CTR for that page would be 2%.
To help you in understanding the calculation better, the following is the formula for calculating the CTR.
CTR = (total number of clicks / total number of impressions) x 100
Why is CTR Important
As we have told you earlier that CTR is an important metric in determining the success of a PPC ad, organic search result ranking, email marketing campaign, etc. It helps the marketers to understand the reaction of the users to a specific advertising campaign or an organic result.
If an ad or a keyword you’re targeting has a low CTR then it could indicate that you’re spending money on irrelevant keywords or targeting the wrong audience. On the other hand, if an ad or keyword has a high CTR, then it means that users are finding the ad or keyword quite relevant.
Take the example of a PPC ad for an e-commerce store, the main purpose of the ad is to direct potential customers to the landing page or the store homepage so that they make a purchase. The CTR would tell the advertisers how effective the ad copy is and whether it is drawing the potential customers to the store or not. Basically, CTR is the first step in figuring out the relevancy of the ad for the users and how well they are responding to the advertising campaign. Similarly, if your web page is not getting enough clicks that means that you need to write a better title tag to get more clicks. If you want your ad or site to have higher CTR, then you need to focus on the ad copy, ad position, title tag and meta description or you can use SerpClix to improve your CTR.
However, higher CTR doesn’t mean that your business is making more sales and generating more revenue. Because Click-through-rate only tells you about the number of people clicking on the specific link and it doesn’t say that they are making the desired action. This is why advertisers use CTR with conversion rate to figure out the influence of the specific campaign. For those who are not aware of conversion rate, it is a percentage that indicates how many visitors have converted to complete the desired action out of the total number of visitors. By using both metrics, you can figure out the success of any advertising campaign.
What is a Good Click-through-rate
This is the question that many clients ask from marketers and the truth is there is no definite answer for this question because it depends on various factors like your industry, keyword, ad position, etc. There is no magic number that can tell out whether the CTR is good or bad. However, you can determine it by looking at your industry’s average click-through rates. Once you know about the average CTR for your industry or keyword, you can make a plan to achieve a higher click-through rate.
CTR is important but you should not be focusing on Click-throughs only to make or break your campaigns. Because a keyword with a high click-through rate isn’t always going to generate leads or make sales and that is bad for your business. Your main goal of the campaign should be to make your business profitable not to get higher CTRs.
For example, you have written an ad or your title tag says “get 50% discount on laptops”. This may help you in getting high CTRs but if you’re not giving the discount then it would not help your business to achieve the required goal which is making the business profitable. This is why you should always focus on the business metrics first then CTR and other metrics.
How CTR Affects Organic Traffic
If you have written a great blog post but if it’s getting some impressions but not clicks then that means that something is not right. That means your title tag is not compelling enough or your title tag and your page content don’t have the same intent. Or your meta description is completely off track as compared to your page content. There are some remedies to improve the CTR which are as follows:
- Improve the title tag – have it more keyword rich and it should match the intent of the content on your page.
- Improve the meta description – your meta description should be crisp and to the point and make sure that it doesn’t run over the 140 character limit.
- Have a better slug for your URL – have the keyword in the URL and avoid writing long URLs.
- Add FAQ schema or write your content to have rich snippets enabled.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that CTR is an important metric for determining the success of any advertising or SEO campaign. However, you cannot rely only on CTR to figure out the success of your campaign. By focusing on CTR and other relevant metrics you can run successful marketing campaigns.
