Click-through rate, CTR, is the number of clicks on a link, ad or result divided by the number of times it was shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage.
Definition
Click-through rate, CTR, is the number of clicks on a link, ad or result divided by the number of times it was shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. It measures how compelling something is at the point of exposure: an ad's CTR reflects how well its creative and targeting draw a click; a search result's CTR reflects how appealing its title and snippet are for the query; an email's CTR reflects how well its content prompts action.
CTR is an intermediate metric, not an end in itself. A high CTR on an ad that produces no conversions is a warning, not a success — it usually means the creative is attracting the wrong people or over-promising.
CTR is most useful as a diagnostic and a testing signal: comparing CTR across creative variants, headline options, or snippet phrasings isolates which framing draws attention, after which the downstream metrics (conversion rate, cost per result, player quality) determine whether that attention was worth having.
In context
In iGaming media buying, CTR is the first-pass filter in creative testing: after enough impressions, creatives below a CTR threshold are cut before they accumulate conversion data, because a creative that cannot earn a click will not earn a deposit. But the threshold is a floor, not a target — the winning creative is the one with the best cost per qualified FTD, and among creatives that clear the CTR floor, higher CTR does not reliably predict better downstream value.
In SEO, CTR from the search results page is a lever that is somewhat independent of ranking position: two pages at position four can have very different CTR depending on how appealing their title and meta description are for the query, and improving those can lift traffic without any change in rank. Search-console data lets a site find pages with good average positions but below-expected CTR — a signal that the title and snippet are underselling the page — which is a low-effort, low-risk optimisation.
Worked example
An SEO team finds 20 pages ranking at positions 3–6 with click-through rates roughly a third below the expected rate for those positions. Rewriting the titles and meta descriptions to state each page's specific value lifts their combined organic traffic by about 25% over a month, with average position essentially unchanged.
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