What is CTR?
Click-Through Rate: the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it.
More details
Calculating CTR: (clicks ÷ impressions) × 100. What counts as a good CTR depends heavily on the channel. For Google Search Ads a good CTR is around 3-8%; for display ads, 0.1% is already normal. A high CTR means your ad is relevant and appealing, but it says nothing about what happens after the click.
For example…
An ad with the headline "Industrial sanding machines" had a CTR of 1.2%. After it was changed to "Sanding machines for professional coating — available for immediate delivery", the CTR rose to 4.8%.
Where it goes wrong
A high CTR is not a goal in itself. An ad that overpromises gets plenty of clicks and few customers, and you end up paying for visitors who click straight back. So always judge CTR together with what happens after the click.
Conversely, a low CTR can be perfectly fine with deliberately broad targeting: you reach lots of people who did not know you yet, and that is exactly the point. The question is not whether the percentage is high, but whether it fits what the campaign has to do.
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