Click through rate

Click through rate (CTR) is a measurement used in online advertising.

Overview
Click through rate is given as a percentage. If an advertisement has a click through rate of 5%, this means out of 100 people who saw the advertisement, 5 people clicked the link and reached the target website.

History
Click though rate has dropped significantly over the past years. In 1994, an advertisement was placed by AT&T on the website HotWired – considered as the world's first digital advertisement. The ad had a CTR of 44%, implying that out of 100 people who saw the ad, 44 clicked on the ad and landed on the AT&T website.  In 2020, Google ads have a CTR of 3.17%, implying that out of 100 people seeing the ad, only about 3 people clicked on and went into the advertiser's website.

Email campaigns
An email campaign is sending out emails to a large number of recipients at a time to promote a product or service. CTR in email campaigns is the number of people who clicked the link in the email and landed on the sender's website. In 2020, the average email campaigns' CTR is 2.62.

Search engine rankings
CTR is an important factor in Search Engines like Google. For a search term, Google will display ten results. If the number of users clicking on the second result is more than the number clicking on the top result, with time the second result will move up because of its high CTR. Likewise, CTR influences the ranking of video sharing sites like YouTube.

 References 

Category:E-mail
Category:Marketing