Click-through rate, or CTR, is the share of people who saw your ad or search listing and clicked it, worked out as clicks divided by impressions. A 2% CTR means two clicks for every hundred impressions.
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Click-through rate, or CTR, is the share of people who saw your ad or search listing and went on to click it. You work it out by dividing clicks by impressions, so a listing shown 1,000 times and clicked 20 times has a CTR of 2%. It is a rate, not a count, which is what makes it useful for comparing listings that were shown a different number of times.
CTR turns up in more than one place. In Google Ads it measures how often your ads are clicked when they show, and Google uses a prediction of it, called expected click-through rate, as one of the real-time signals in the auction that sets your cost per click, and your reported Quality Score is partly a readout of that same signal. In Google Search Console it measures how often your organic listings are clicked. Paid social platforms report it for their ads too.
Three things move it most. The first is position: the higher you appear, the more clicks you earn, and a page-two listing is barely clicked at the best of times. The second is how well your title or ad copy matches what the person was looking for. The third is what else is on the results page. When an AI Overview answers the question up front, fewer people click through to any website, so the same ranking can earn a lower CTR than it used to.
One honest point: CTR on its own does not tell you whether the traffic is any good. A high click rate on a vague ad can bring visitors who never convert, and a low rate may only reflect a ranking problem, not a lost audience. Read it alongside impressions, average position and conversions, so you know whether to fix the ranking, the wording or the landing page.
Key points
- CTR is clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage.
- It appears in Google Ads, Google Search Console and paid social reports, and means the same thing in each.
- Expected CTR feeds the live ad auction, so it can influence what you pay per click, and it is one of the parts of your reported Quality Score.
- Position, how well your wording matches the search and AI Overviews all move it.
- A low CTR is not always an AI story: check average position before blaming an Overview.
- Read it alongside impressions, position and conversions, not on its own.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about click-through rate.
There is no universal figure, because CTR depends on the channel, the position and what the searcher wanted. A branded search, where someone typed your name, can earn a very high click rate, while a listing near the bottom of page one or on page two earns very little. Search ads, organic listings, social ads and display banners all behave differently, so a rate that is strong for a banner would be weak for a branded search ad. Compare CTR against your own past results for the same queries and position, not against someone else's headline number.
Divide clicks by impressions and multiply by 100. If a listing was shown 2,000 times and clicked 50 times, the CTR is 2.5%. Be careful with the average CTR figure in reports such as Google Search Console, because it blends every query together: a handful of high-volume queries can drag it up or down, so look at individual queries and pages before drawing a conclusion.
There are several common causes, and they point to different fixes. Your average position may have slipped, an AI Overview or another search feature may now answer the question above your listing, a new competitor may be taking the clicks, or ad copy may have gone stale. A fall can also be a side effect of good news: if your page starts appearing for many more searches it ranks poorly for, impressions climb faster than clicks and the average drops. Check position and impressions alongside CTR before assuming the cause.
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