Click-Through Rate CTR

Click-through rate is the share of people who clicked, out of everyone who was shown the thing. Ten clicks from two hundred views is five per cent. That is the whole sum. It works the same for a search result, an advert, an email or a button, and most people write it as CTR.

In Google Search Console it lives in the Performance report. Four numbers sit at the top. Clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position. An impression means your result appeared on a screen someone actually looked at. Open the Queries tab to see the questions people typed, and the Pages tab to see which of your pages earned the clicks. Filter to one page, sort by impressions, and read the rate beside each query.

The useful move is to find the rows with many impressions and few clicks. That is a page being shown and passed over. Nine times out of ten the title is the reason. A title that starts with the company name, or promises something vague, or gets cut off halfway because it is too long, throws away attention it already won. Rewrite it as the answer the person wanted, keep it under about sixty characters, and put the useful word first.

Honest numbers help you judge. On an ordinary search, first place takes somewhere around a quarter to a third of the clicks. Second place is roughly half of that. Near the bottom of page one you are at two or three per cent, and page two is under one. Searches for your own brand run far higher, because the person already decided. Questions with an answer box run far lower, because the box takes the click. So compare a page with pages like it, never with a single figure from an article.

Two traps catch people. A rising rate with falling clicks usually means you slipped down and are now shown to fewer but keener people. And a title written only for the click, which the page does not deliver, loses the sale anyway. Linkysoft rewrites titles against the page rather than against the keyword on a digital marketing project.

One more thing worth knowing. Search Console keeps sixteen months of history and no more. Owners who want that rate beside their own sales usually end up with a small internal dashboard, which Linkysoft builds as a web application that collects the numbers every night.