What is CTR?
Click-through rate: the share of people who see an ad or a result and click it. A measure of how well the message matches what they were looking for.
Click-through rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of times something was seen. If an ad is shown a thousand times and clicked fifty, its CTR is five per cent. It applies to ads and to ordinary search results alike.
It is best read as a measure of relevance: how well what you showed matched what the person was looking for. A low CTR usually means one of three things. You are showing up for the wrong searches, the message does not answer what they wanted, or something on the results page is more appealing than you are.
In Google Ads it matters twice over, because expected CTR is one of the three parts of Quality Score, which affects what you pay. In ordinary search, a title and description that genuinely describe the page earn clicks that a vague or clickbait one does not.
A high CTR is not the goal in itself, though. Clicks that do not turn into customers are only cost. The number that follows it, conversion rate, is where the result is.
Paid media measured on what it returns, not what it spends.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok campaigns built on search terms, creative testing and conversion tracking, not impressions.