Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of people who clicked a link after seeing it — a basic measure of how compelling it was.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who actually clicked a link out of everyone who saw it. It's the most basic measure of how compelling a piece of content — an ad, an email subject line, a search result — was at getting a click.
For a concrete example, a marketing email sent to 10,000 subscribers gets opened by 3,200 of them; of those 3,200, 240 click the call-to-action button. The email's CTR is 240 / 3,200 = 7.5%. (Or, if you measure CTR against the full sent list rather than opens, it's 240 / 10,000 = 2.4% — both are valid; pick one and be consistent.)
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Type your numbers and the CTR is computed live, with a few common benchmarks for context.
Try it — CTR calculator
Click-through rate
2.40%
Where you sit on common benchmarks
- Display banner ads0.05–0.1%
- Paid search (top result)3–6%
- Marketing email (vs opens)2–5%
- Push notifications7–9%
- Organic search (#1 result)~30%
Benchmarks are rough industry medians and vary heavily by audience, format, and time. Use them as anchors, not targets.
What CTR actually measures
CTR is one of two things, depending on whose denominator you're using:
- Click-to-impression rate. Clicks divided by impressions (everyone who saw the link). Used in ads, search results, and most channel reporting.
- Click-to-open rate. Clicks divided by opens (people who opened the email). Used in email marketing.
These produce very different numbers from the same data. A campaign with a 25% open rate and a 6% click-to-open rate has only a 1.5% click-to-impression rate. Mixing the two in the same report makes campaigns look better or worse than they are.
Why CTR alone is misleading
CTR measures the click — not what happens after. Three traps:
- High CTR, low conversion. A clickbait subject line drives clicks but the visitor bounces. CTR went up, business outcomes didn't.
- Audience pre-filtering. A campaign sent only to your most engaged subscribers will have a great CTR — and tell you nothing about whether the campaign would work on a colder audience.
- Click bots. Especially in display advertising, a portion of clicks aren't human. CTR figures from open-network ads should be discounted accordingly.
The fix is to pair CTR with a downstream metric: conversion rate, time-on-page, revenue-per-click. CTR is a leading indicator, not a verdict.
Common mistakes
- Comparing CTRs across denominators. Click-to-open and click-to-impression aren't the same metric. Don't average them, don't compare them.
- Ignoring sample size. A 10% CTR on 50 impressions tells you nothing. Most CTR comparisons need at least a few hundred impressions per variant before they mean anything.
- Treating CTR as a goal. Optimising hard for CTR at the expense of relevance trains the channel to send people you don't actually want — they click and leave.