Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who click a link, ad, or search result after seeing it. It is calculated as clicks divided by impressions and usually shown as a percentage. In SEO, CTR most often refers to organic search results as reported in Google Search Console.
At a glance
- Type
- metric
- Formula
- clicks ÷ impressions, usually as a percentage
- Used in
- Google Search Console (Performance report), Google Ads
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How is CTR calculated?
The formula is the same in every channel:
CTR = clicks / impressions × 100
A search result shown 2,000 times and clicked 60 times has a CTR of 3 percent.
Each platform defines for itself what counts as an impression and what counts as a click. CTR values from different tools are therefore only partly comparable.
How does Google Search Console count CTR?
In the Search Console Performance report, a click is any click that takes the user to a page outside Google Search, Discover, or News. An impression means a user saw, or potentially saw, a link to your site. On a standard results page, a result counts as an impression whether or not the user scrolled down to it. Exceptions apply to carousels, expandable sections, and infinite scroll, for example in mobile image search. There, the item has to be scrolled into view or expanded.
A result near the bottom of page one can therefore collect impressions nobody actually saw, which pulls down CTR for lower positions. Elements above the organic results, such as ads, featured snippets, or AI Overviews, also affect how many people reach a given result. Published numbers on these effects come from third-party studies and vary by industry and query.
CTR in paid search
In Google Ads, CTR shows how often people who see an ad or free product listing click it. Google uses it to estimate a keyword’s expected CTR, which is one component of Ad Rank and therefore influences where an ad appears.
Example
A guide ranks in position 3 for a query. Search Console reports 12,000 impressions and 240 clicks in a month, a CTR of 2 percent. After the title and meta description are rewritten, CTR rises to 3.1 percent at the same position. Whether the rewrite caused the change only becomes clear after several weeks, because seasonality and the layout of the results page also shift. (Example with invented figures.)
Common mistakes
- Treating chart and table as the same. The Performance report chart aggregates by property, while the table aggregates by page when grouped by page. Google notes that chart and table totals can differ for this reason, and so can CTR.
- Analyzing preliminary data. According to Google, the newest data can be preliminary and may still change over the next few hours. The chart marks it with a dotted line.
- Averaging percentages. The CTR of a group of pages is total clicks divided by total impressions. Averaging the CTRs of individual pages weights a page with 50 impressions the same as one with 50,000.
- Comparing across positions (practical experience). A page that moved from position 2 to 8 will usually lose CTR even if its snippet is unchanged. Compare pages at similar positions.
- Mixing brand and non-brand queries (practical experience). Searches for a brand name tend to produce much higher CTR and distort site-wide numbers.
FAQ
What is a good CTR? There is no universal value. CTR depends on position, search intent, brand, and the features on the results page. A more useful benchmark is your own data for similar pages and positions.
Is a 2% CTR bad? Not on its own. For a result in position 8 it may be normal, for a brand query in position 1 it would be low.
Sources
- What are impressions, position, and clicks? – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): Definition – Google Ads Helpsupport.google.com
- Performance report (Search results) – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
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