Glossary
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The share of people who click after seeing something, calculated as clicks divided by impressions and shown as a percentage.
Click-through rate, or CTR, is the share of people who click something after seeing it. It applies to ads, search results, and emails alike. You calculate it by dividing clicks by impressions and turning the result into a percentage.
Clicks / Impressions x 100 = CTR
30 clicks / 3,000 impressions x 100 = 1% CTR
CTR tells you how compelling your ad, headline, or subject line is at earning the click. A higher CTR usually means your message is landing with the people who see it, and on ad platforms it can lower what you pay, because platforms reward ads people actually click.
Here is the important caution. CTR measures interest, not money. It is easy to write a wild headline that gets clicked constantly and then sells nothing, because the click was driven by curiosity rather than genuine buying intent. A 5% CTR feeding a page that never converts is worse than a 1% CTR feeding a page that does. CTR gets people through the door. Your conversion rate decides what happens after that.
Read CTR alongside cost and conversion, never on its own. To see how the click fits the wider math, read how paid advertising actually makes money.