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.