Click-through rate (CTR) calculator

This CTR calculator gives you your click-through rate from clicks and impressions, and sets it against the published average for your channel and industry. Switch it round and it tells you how many clicks a rate should bring, or how many impressions you need. Or choose “Compare two ads” to find out whether one ad is really beating the other, or just got lucky.

What is click-through rate?

Click-through rate is the share of people who saw something and clicked it. An ad shown 8,000 times that got 240 clicks has a CTR of 3%. It works the same for paid ads, your listings in Google, and the links in an email.

How to calculate CTR (the CTR formula)

Use clicks and impressions from the same report and the same dates. Mixing a month of clicks with a week of impressions is the usual reason a CTR comes out impossibly high.

Why CTR matters

It’s the first sign of whether your ad or listing says the right thing to the right people. A low rate means you are being shown to people who don’t want what you’re offering, or offering it badly.

In Google Ads it also costs you money. Expected click-through rate is one of the three parts of Quality Score, with ad relevance and landing page experience, and a better Quality Score can mean paying less for the same position.

What is a good CTR for ads

It depends almost entirely on where the ad runs. A search ad answers somebody who has just typed what they want. A social ad interrupts somebody who was looking at something else. The first gets clicked far more.

The published averages bear that out. LocaliQ and WordStream’s 2026 search benchmarks put the average search ad at 6.64% across industries.

Their 2025 Facebook benchmarks put lead campaigns at 2.59% and traffic campaigns at 1.71%. Both come from US accounts, so treat them as a yardstick, not a target. The full table by industry is further down this page, and the calculator compares you with it.

The better comparison is still with yourself. Your best ad against your worst, this month against last. That tells you what is working in your market.

What affects your CTR?

Position first. Ads and listings at the top of the page get clicked far more than the same words further down.

Then the words. An ad that repeats the search, names the place and gives a reason to choose you beats one that says “quality services”. Then the extras: sitelinks, prices, a phone number, star ratings. Bigger results take more of the screen.

Then who sees it. Showing for searches you should never have shown for drags the rate down, which is what negative keywords are for.

Comparing two ads with the CTR calculator

Run two ads for a week and one will almost always have the higher rate. The question is whether the gap is real or luck.

Choose “Compare two ads” and put in each ad’s clicks and impressions. The calculator runs the standard test for comparing two rates and gives you a confidence figure. At 95% or more you can call it. Below that it tells you roughly how many impressions each ad needs before the answer is clear, so you don’t switch off a winner too early.

How to improve your paid CTR

Match the ad to the search. If someone searches “emergency plumber Navan” and your ad says “Plumbing Services Ireland”, you have told them nothing. Put the service, the place and the reason to choose you in the headline.

Use every asset the platform gives you, cut the searches that don’t fit, and test two versions of every ad. Then check the clicks turn into something. A higher CTR that brings the wrong people costs more than a lower one that brings the right ones. The Google Ads budget calculator works from enquiries back to spend, which keeps the rate in its place.

How to improve your organic CTR

Search Console shows clicks, impressions and CTR for every page and every search. A page that ranks well but gets few clicks is one of the easiest wins in SEO. Usually the title and description don’t promise what the searcher wants.

Sometimes it isn’t you at all. Our own Instagram ads cost guide held at around second place on google.ie for “cost of instagram ads” while its clicks from Ireland fell from 56 in a quarter to 6.

The ranking didn’t move. An AI Overview arrived above it and answered the question on the results page. A falling CTR with a steady position is the sign to look for, and the fix is to give people a reason to click that the overview can’t: a tool, your own figures, a promise the title keeps.

How to calculate click-through rate for email

For email, the impressions are the emails delivered. Click rate is unique clicks ÷ emails delivered × 100: 60 people clicking from 2,000 delivered is 3%.

Some tools also report click-to-open rate, which is clicks ÷ opens. Read that one with care. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection loads emails automatically, which inflates opens, so click rate against delivered emails is the steadier number.

Average click-through rate by industry

The published averages the calculator compares you with, exactly as LocaliQ and WordStream report them. They come from US accounts, so treat them as a yardstick rather than a target.

Sources: LocaliQ and WordStream, search advertising benchmarks 2026 (Google Ads and Microsoft Ads) and Facebook ads benchmarks 2025, from US accounts. A dash means the source publishes no figure for that industry.