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CTR (Click through rate)

What is CTR (Click through rate)?

CTR is, as the title of this entry indicates, the acronym for click through rate. It is a metric widely used in digital marketing and mass mailing campaigns, which measures the percentage of clicks that a particular link received, taking into account the number of impressions or views generated by that link.

CTR takes as a reference the total number of clicks and impressions that a link received; unique users are not taken into account. It is important to understand that the same user can click several times on the links.

1. How to calculate the CTR?

The CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks a link has obtained by the number of times that link has been viewed by users (impressions) and multiplying it by 100. The formula to calculate the CTR is as follows:

CTR = (clicks / impressions) x 100

Let’s see an example of CTR: after sending an email marketing campaign we observe that the link we included in the newsletter received 70 clicks and the email has been opened 2200 times, thus the resulting CTR would be 3.33%.

CTR= (Clics / Impressions) x 100 = (70 / 2100) x 100 = 3.33%.

The CTR is a basic metric and one of the most interesting KPIs in digital marketing, and you will surely have seen it in many places, from Google Ads metrics to Facebook Ads, where it offers the CTR data.

Importance of CTR

CTR is a very valuable KPI, having a high CTR brings you benefits such as:

  • It increases web traffic to your pages and landing pages, since a higher CTR ratio increases the number of visits we will have on our websites.
  • You can create more profitable advertising campaigns, since Google Ads and the rest of platforms work using the metric “quality level” (measure to qualify the interest that the ad awakens in users), and the percentage of clicks received is decisive for this; it also improves the ranking as well as decreases the amount of money you will pay for each click. A good CTR makes the same budget more profitable.
  • It indicates if the ads are profitable, since clicks are a very clear indication of the interest in our ads.

3. Improve the CTR on your ads

There are several key aspects that must be taken into consideration to have an increasing CTR in our ad campaigns, test the ones that best suit your current marketing plan and measure the CTR after testing:

– Continually adapt your bids, periodically revise the price of your bids to stay at the top of the search section.

– Include a URL at the bottom of the ad, you will reinforce the weight of the keywords it contains.

Keywords are everything for ranking a page, so make use of the main keywords in the title of the ad, inside the ad and in the URL that leads to your landing page.

Use all types of extensions available, since using many types of extensions makes your ads more relevant.

Use an irresistible copy, you must write a very attractive ad, and with a call to action.

Keep an eye on the competition, a good element to improve the CTR is to observe the best ads of your competitors and take ideas from them to make your offer more effective.