All terms
Analytics and measurement

CTR

Click-through rate

In short

CTR is the share of people who click after seeing your link or ad. 20 clicks on 1,000 impressions gives a CTR of 2 percent.

CTR is clicks divided by impressions. The number is used for ordinary search results, ads and newsletters alike. It says something about how tempting your link looks where it appears, but nothing about what happens after the click.

Visible, but not clicked

You can rank on the first page of Google and still get few visits. Then it is often the title and description that fail to convince. A page with a high position and a low CTR is one of the cheapest improvements you can make, because the work of becoming visible is already done.

In ads, CTR also affects the price. Google Ads rewards ads that people actually click, so better ad copy can give a lower CPC.

How to check yours

Open Google Search Console and go to the Search results report. Sort the pages by impressions. Find pages with many impressions and a low CTR, and rewrite the title tag and meta description so they answer more clearly what people are searching for. Check the numbers again after a few weeks.

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