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, and that is the whole sum. It works the same for a search result, an advert, an email or a button, and most people just write CTR.

In Google Search Console the rate lives in the Performance report, where four numbers sit across the top, which are clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position. An impression means your result appeared on a screen that someone actually looked at. The Queries tab shows the questions people typed, and the Pages tab shows which of your pages earned the clicks. From there, filter to a single page, sort by impressions, and read the rate beside each query.

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

Honest numbers help you judge what you are looking at. On an ordinary search, first place takes about a quarter to a third of the clicks, and second place roughly half of that. Near the bottom of page one you are at two or three per cent, and page two is under one. Brand searches run much higher because the person already decided, and a question with an answer box runs much lower because the box takes the click. So compare a page with pages like it, not with one figure from an article.

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

One more thing is worth knowing, because 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. Linkysoft builds it as a web application that collects the numbers every night.