Enter clicks and impressions to get CTR, plus benchmarks for search, shopping, display and social placements.
Click-through rate measures whether the ad matched what the person was looking for. On search it is the single strongest input to Quality Score, which means a better CTR lowers your cost per click for the same position, it pays twice.
Optimising for CTR directly is one of the most reliable ways to make an account worse.
Optimising for CTR directly is one of the most reliable ways to make an account worse. Curiosity-gap headlines, unqualified offers and vague price claims all lift click-through rate and fill the account with people who were never going to buy. You end up paying more in total for fewer conversions.
Always read CTR next to conversion rate. A creative that drops CTR from 4 percent to 3 percent while lifting conversion rate from 2 percent to 4 percent has just halved your cost per acquisition.
| Placement | Typical CTR |
|---|---|
| Google Search, brand terms | 8–25% |
| Google Search, non-brand | 2–6% |
| Google Shopping | 0.6–1.5% |
| Performance Max | 0.8–3% |
| Display and remarketing | 0.4–0.9% |
| Meta feed | 0.8–2% |
| Email marketing | 2–5% |
A sudden drop usually has one of four causes: a new competitor bidding aggressively, ad rotation serving a weaker variant, a shift in the query mix toward looser matches, or position loss from a budget or bid change.
Check impression share first. If impressions rose sharply while clicks held steady, you are probably showing for broader queries, the ad did not get worse, the audience did.
On any channel sold by the impression, CTR is the exchange rate between what you pay and what you get. The same CPM produces very different click costs depending on how many people click.
| CTR | CPC at an $8 CPM |
|---|---|
| 0.5% | $1.60 |
| 1.0% | $0.80 |
| 2.0% | $0.40 |
This is the legitimate reason to care about CTR. Not as a goal, but as the lever that decides what your media actually costs per visitor. The CPM calculator and CPC calculator are the two ends of the same equation.
On search, a large share of CTR is decided by where the ad appears rather than what it says. The top of a results page earns far more clicks than the same ad further down, and a page crowded with shopping units, maps and answer boxes pushes every text ad lower whatever its quality.
That has two consequences. First, comparing CTR between ads that ran in different positions mostly measures the position. A creative test only means something when the ads competed for the same slots. Second, a CTR drop with no change to the ad is usually a change in the auction: a new competitor bidding higher, a new result type on the page, or a seasonal shift in who is searching.
Before rewriting ads to recover CTR, check whether impression share or top-of-page rate moved in the same week. If they did, the ads were never the problem.
Usually because the ad promises something the page does not deliver, or because it attracts curiosity rather than intent. A high CTR with a low conversion rate means you are paying for clicks from people who were never going to buy.
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