CTR Calculator
CTR Formula
To calculate click-through rate you need to know the number of clicks on your ad and the number of impressions. You can calculate it with our free CTR calculator above or manually calculate it using the formula: CTR = total number of clicks on your ad/total number of impressions. To get it as a percentage you can multiply the result by 100. This metric gives you a benchmark that allows you to compare performance across multiple ads and even against industry published CTR's from competitors within your niche.
Did you know that many businesses end up failing within one year of being open? This rate of failure tends to increase the more years a business is open. If you care about the success of your business, you'll have to take a few measures to make sure that it is still around after several years.
You can accomplish this by exposing your business and its products to a wider range of people. This is primarily possible with the help of ads, but you can't run ads without first knowing about their click through rate. The click through rate, also known as the CTR, is one of the most important website stats you can track.
It has everything to do with how many impressions a certain ad gets in a given period of time and how many times a click will result from all of those impressions. But how can a click through rate affect your business's success and what makes a CTR good or bad? Keep reading and learn more about how the CTR works.
What Is the Click Through Rate Exactly?
Suppose that you are running an ad such as a pay-per-click (PPC) ad to promote whatever your website has to offer. This kind of ad will measure how many impressions it receives in a given period of time. The more impressions an ad has, the better, because that means that people are seeing and interacting with your ad in some way.
An impression may mean that someone simply saw your ad while scrolling through a website or viewing a video. This, of course, won't drastically help your website because the person in question isn't actually interacting with your ad or bringing your website any traffic.
However, the more people see your ad, the better, because that means that such an ad will have a higher chance of being clicked on.
Getting clicks is of utmost importance if you care about boosting the success of your website. When a user clicks on an ad, that ad will take them to a certain link, likely your website.
There, the user will be able to explore whatever products or services you have to offer. The click through rate is the percentage of impressions an ad gets before it finally gets clicked on by someone.
Calculating the CTR
For example, suppose you're running an ad and that ad gets 1,000 impressions. This means that your ad gets shown on a particular webpage or webpages 1,000 times. Internet users may or may not see this ad and they may or may not click on it.
But if the ad gets shown 1,000 times and one person clicks on it, this means that your CTR is exactly 0.1%. Of course, the numbers in real life are rarely so exact. You may find that the CTR for your ads is larger or smaller than this number.
Whatever the case, the number your CTR generates is important for a variety of reasons, and its success could easily control the fate of your business. But how, you might ask? It all has to do with how relevant your ads are and how users respond to and engage with your ads.
Once you find the CTR for the ad you're running, you'll better be able to see the analytics for that ad and how that ad is working when exposed to certain groups of people. This is important because some groups of people may be more interested in clicking on your ad than others, and by knowing that, you can better optimize your ad campaigns and ultimately your CTR as well.
Why Does the Click Through Rate Matter for Your Business?
Suppose that you're running an ad and it has a very low CTR. This means that your ad is getting a lot of impressions, perhaps thousands of impressions, but in comparison to all of those impressions, only a very small number of people are actually clicking on that ad. What does this mean exactly?
It means that there is something wrong with the ad to the extent that it is not resonating with your target audience. Or, on the other hand, the ad may not be very catchy or interesting enough for most people to bother clicking on it. The ad may even be too vague and not reel people in.
Whatever the case, if your CTR is very low, the result is bad for business. This means that you're spending money on advertising but not getting much of a positive result. As a result, you won't end up with any new customers and your website's traffic will stay the same.
This is a recipe for disaster for new and growing businesses. Even for large and established businesses, it is still a bad sign. But the opposite is true for ads that have a high CTR.
High Click Through Rates and the Future of Your Business
If your ad has a high CTR, this means that there is a large number of people clicking on the ad compared to the number of impressions the ad has. For example, if the ad has 1,000 impressions and 800 clicks, this would be an ad with a very high CTR.
This, of course, would be ridiculously good news for your business. This means that your business would be getting a large influx of traffic through that ad and whatever other ads you might be running that also have high CTRs.
If your website gives your new customers a good impression, they might even turn into repeat customers down the line. This, of course, would only help your business grow and make it more established. But besides more traffic to your website, what other benefits can you expect to see if your ads manage to get high CTRs?
Not everything can be adjusted through the Google Adwords and Facebook Ads dashboard, prior planning is an essential part of your ad.
High click-through rates often depend on the appearance of your ad, the product or service you are selling and the offer you are running. A large amount of white space may be off putting for an audience and decrease the CTR of an ad. Use colors that align with your brand and show off its uniqueness while catering to your specific audience.
What Is a Good CTR?
Using CTR isn't hard as long as you know what you're doing and how to target a certain group of people. As long as you know what you're doing, you could end up with a high click through rate without too much trouble. But is it really worth working towards a high CTR or should you put your energy into another aspect when it comes to growing your business?
The first thing you should know about good results from CTR is that CTR plays a big part in impacting the rank of your ads. Ad rank is of utmost importance if you're trying to reach a certain goal with your ads such as increasing your website's traffic or selling more of your products.
The higher your ad rank is, the more people will see it. Google (and other search engines) control the rank of all ads on the internet. Google will rank an ad depending on a variety of factors, but as long as the search engine sees something promising in the ad, it should rank the ad quite highly.
Usually, ads rank well if they contain good SEO factors such as good keywords and if they are relevant to whatever a certain group of people is searching for.
On the other hand, if an ad has a low ad rank, then not as many people will have the chance to see that ad. Instead, people will see ads that rank higher and are generally more popular. This can be frustrating to deal with if your ads often rank low on search engines.
However, a good CTR can fix this problem.
The Benefits of a High CTR
The higher your CTR is, the more likely Google will be to rank the ad higher. This, of course, means that more people will see your ad and more people will be around to click on your ad.
This is especially true if your actual CTR rate for an ad exceeds the CTR that Google expected that ad to have. You can hardly get a better result than that. Having a good CTR is also important for your quality score as an advertiser.
A quality score has everything to do with your relevance as an advertiser. It is important to be as relevant as possible not only with ads but with landing pages, web content, and so on. The more relevant your content and advertisements are, the more likely Google and other search engines will be when ranking these ads.
In general, it is best to keep your click through rate as high as possible. That way, you can be sure that plenty of people are clicking on your ads and not just looking at them as they scroll by. Of course, this is easier said than done.
If you have a low CTR, you might be wondering what you can do to increase it so you can reap some of its benefits. Fortunately, there are several ways in which you can do this which we will explore next.
How to Achieve a Better Result With Your CTR
When it comes to improving CTR, the first thing you need to do is make sure that you optimize the copy and title for your ad as much as possible. If your ad is very vague, for example, it's not going to catch anyone's attention.
Even if thousands of people see your ad every day, there would be no incentive to click on it if the ad doesn't advertise anything that people might be interested in.
Of course, being too specific in an ad usually isn't too good, either. The last thing you want is to shove a wall of text into a small ad space. This will be very unattractive for most users and the result will look a lot like spam.
As a result, people won't be interested in clicking on this kind of ad, either. Instead, for the best results, you will want to create an ad that is short yet catchy and informative. This can be difficult at first, but once you get the hang of it, you'll find that it isn't as hard as it seems.
The goal is to create an ad that will tell your viewers just enough about what you're trying to advertise but not too much that it makes the ad convoluted. A simple headline followed by a single sentence is often all that an ad needs to attract attention. Depending on your target audience, you can tweak your ad in one way or another to attract even more attention.
Other Examples
Another example of how to improve your CTR is to use visuals. Humans are very visually driven creatures and using pictures often helps to attract more attention. This is very true when it comes to advertisements.
If your ad is nothing but text and a background color, it isn't going to be very visually stimulating. As a result, your CTR will likely be very low. But if you put an attractive picture into the mix, you will find that your CTR will effortlessly increase.
You might need to experiment a little to see what kind of results work best for your ads and your audience, but once you figure it out, you should see a big improvement in your CTR.
What You Need to Know About Click Through Rate
Click through rate is very important in the world of advertising. It is the percentage of people that click on an ad compared to the number of impressions that ad has.