CTR stands for click-through rate, which is the ratio of users who click on a specific link as compared to the total number of users who have received a web page, an email, or a digital advertisement.
In digital advertising, CTR measures the number of clicks that your ad receives. A viewer who has seen your ad and then clicks on it increases your click-through rate.
In email marketing, CTR is defined as the number of email recipients who click on a link within your email and land on your website, blog, app deep link, or some other destination. In short, it’s the number of clicks your email gets.
CTR is an important metric because it expresses in a quantifiable manner how viewers react to your content. Ideally, you would want to ask each person how they feel about an ad or an email they’ve just seen. But when you send a message out to millions of recipients it becomes impractical and impossible to get feedback like this.
Instead, the click-through rate becomes a stand-in for that feedback since it expresses a viewer’s willingness to go further down your sales funnel as they click from an initial piece of content (such as an ad) and move on to another piece of content (such as a landing page).
In both online advertising and email marketing, the formula for CTR is: total clicks divided by total number of messages sent.
With a higher click-through rate, your quality score increases, which in turn leads to an improvement in your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). So, CTR helps boost your SEO efforts.
