True or false: click-through rates are higher when there is video content in the advertisement.

Here’s a simple click-through rate formula:

CTR = (click-throughs / impressions) x 100

For example, if 100 people see an online ad and 5 people click to learn more about the product, that ad has a CTR of 5%.

CTR can be used to measure the success of pay-per-click (PPC) search results (for example with Google AdWords or other search engines), CTAs on a landing page, or hyperlinks in blog posts and email campaigns.  

Why CTR is important

CTR is an important metric because it helps you understand your customers—it tells you what works (and what doesn’t work) when trying to reach your target audience. A low CTR could indicate that you’re targeting the wrong audience or that you’re not speaking their language persuasively enough to convince them to click.

Let's take the example of a paid search ad campaign that directs people to your website, e-commerce store, or landing page. An online advertisement’s CTR lets you know how effective the ad is at drawing in potential customers; you can then compare ad copy, ad position, and CTAs to see which has the highest CTR.

What is a good CTR?

CTR varies between industries. To determine what a good click-through rate would look like for your business, you could start by researching your industry’s average click-through rates. Once you have an understanding of existing benchmarks and industry averages, you can begin taking steps to get a higher CTR and reach your business’s goals.

4 tips to improve CTR

There are different factors to consider when you’re trying to increase CTR across different digital marketing channels. How you increase CTR depends on where you want to increase CTR.

For example, if you have a low CTR on a social media channel like Facebook or Twitter, consider which hashtags might help expand your reach to your target audience; and when you’re trying to increase CTR on a PPC ad, you need to pay super close attention to your headline and copy.

Here are four tips to consider when you’re trying to improve CTR:

1) Optimize your headline and copy:

Use one or two focus keyword(s) in your headline and copy. Appeal to your audience’s emotions and needs: solve a problem for them.

2) Include CTAs:

Write a direct and compelling call to action. Your CTA should be inviting and prompt your audience to click.

3) Use images:

Using visuals is a great way to increase CTR. Depending on the marketing channel, different types of images may perform better than others. Run A/B tests with different types of images to find out what works best for your company.

4) Try using hashtags:

Hashtags work across multiple platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Do some research on trending or popular hashtags in your industry, and use hashtags that relate to the rest of your copy to increase the chances of being seen by your target audience.

Market to your ideal customers for better conversions (not just a high CTR)

Click-throughs and conversions are not the same thing: CTR tells you the percentage of people who click, but not the total number of people who convert (e.g., made a purchase or signed up for your newsletter). In other words, an online ad can have a high click-through rate with a very low conversion rate, leaving you with a high cost per conversion (CPC).

So how can you make sure that the people who click on your ads will continue on their customer journey to the point of conversion? You focus on your ideal customers.

Ideal customers are those who would get the most value out of what your business has to offer. They are likely to return again and again if you treat them well, forming the backbone of your customer base—so of course you want to target them with your advertising.

The way you figure out who those people are and what they want from a company like yours is by running some research and building user personas.

Build data-driven user personas

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on demographic and psychographic data of the people who buy your products.

A simple user persona answers the following questions:

1. Who are your customers?

2. What is their main goal?

3. What is preventing them from getting what they want?

The following tools can help you answer these questions so you can tailor your messaging to their needs, helping to overcome their objections and drive actual conversions.

• On-page surveyspolling customers once they’ve converted

Once you’ve got a clear understanding of who your customers are, what they want, and what’s keeping them from getting it, you can create ads that draw in your ideal customers and convince them to convert.

If you're forecasting your digital media spend, you need to compare the ROI of your display ads, paid social, Google Ads, and social media. Depending on your objectives it's worth reviewing and benchmarking metrics like average click-through rates, average cost per click, and cost per lead.

I've put this compilation together to help marketing professionals create direct response conversion models for digital marketing campaigns. By creating budget models using known benchmarks for average CTRs and digital media click-through costs, you can better forecast your return-on-investment from digital media ads in 2022.

This data is particularly useful if you haven't previously invested in advertising on publisher sites through ad networks or paid social media ads since it can help make the case and set expectations with colleagues or clients of the number of visits based on quantitative forecasts. As always, we recommend applying a targeted, data-driven approach to your marketing activities and we have tools and templates to help.

Average CTR benchmarks - November 2022 update

We’ve updated our 2022/23 compilation of average clickthrough rates, cost per click, and cost per lead across Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Throughout 2022, we will update our statistics summaries with the latest research as it becomes available. Stats are in three sections which answer these questions:

• Q. What are average display ad CTRs for different industries?
• Q. What average CPC/ cost per lead can industry marketers expect?
• Q. What are social media ad clickthrough rates - a comparison of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter CTRs?

Search Marketing Benchmarks: Average click-through rate

According to LocalIQ November 2022 data, the average click-through rate for Google Ads is 3.17%. However, industries vary significantly around this data point. For example, arts & entertainment ads receive on average a high 16.29% click-through rate, whereas apparel/ fashion & jewelry ads receive a low 2.24%.

Of course, these figures are averages and in reality, CTRs tend to be higher for brand searches.

We also have a comparison of Google Clickthrough rates by position.

CPC cost per click/ cost per lead search advertising benchmarks

Cost per click in search advertising is driven by many factors. As demonstrated in the table below, depending on the industry, a click could cost a marketer less than $1 or as much as $8-9, such as those in attorneys & legal services.

However, it's important to look at the bigger picture when defining the value of your clicks. $9 is still a very reasonable cost considering the high-value potential for each customer lifecycle in this industry. Therefore it's reasonable to presume that the CPC is driven up by high competition for a relatively smaller number of target customers (/clicks).

Interestingly, the lowest CPC industries in 2022 were arts & entertainment (highest CTR%) and apparel/fashion & jewelry (lowest CTR%). This is particularly great news for arts & entertainment marketers who may find themselves competing on low-cost terms with relative success.

Cost per lead is calculated as the number of leads/number of clicks.

Since a high CTR campaign doesn't necessarily mean more leads, this additional benchmark supports marketers in prioritizing high-quality leads. As you can see from the diagram below, cost per lead shows a different story to cost per click.

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Google Ads (formerly AdWords) display network benchmarks

Wordstream's Google Adwords industry benchmarks average CTRs focuses just on the Google Ads accounts they manage.

Here, the highest search CTR is for dating and personals whereas the lowest industry is legal. The highest display CTR is technology and the lowest is employment services.

However, these stats are higher than the Google average since they only represent accounts managed by WordStream.

Google benchmarks for ad placement

Unfortunately, Google has removed Doubleclick.  So now we can only present previous data. No other alternatives are available as far as I'm aware. Please let me know via LinkedIn if you have good quality representative data we can share.

Previous Doubleclick data shows just than 5 clicks per 10000 impressions, showing the difficulty of driving direct response from online display or banner ads. Perhaps that is why Google no longer publishes this data...

While this is a really low CTR, however you look at it, cross-media optimization shows that online ads do help increase brand awareness and purchase intent, particularly when combined with offline media.

It's not the case that the majority of ad viewers have 'banner blindness' and are not aware of ads that are viewable placements. If this were the case, businesses wouldn't invest in the level of display and programmatic ads that they do.

We also see much higher CTRs online for other online ad formats like Google AdWords and Facebook - these can exceed 1%, so are more effective in driving volume and also typically have higher intent, so conversion rates are higher.

Tests from the likes of Dynamic Logic and Millward Brown conclusively show that display ads also encourage site visits (view throughs) and searches even where people don't click on ads.

Google responsive display ads

Note that more recently Google introduced Responsive Display ads on the Google Display Network as the default ad type. These involve uploading your assets (images, headlines, logos, videos and descriptions) and Google will automatically generate ads to be shown on the Google Display Network.

Reports from early adopters suggest that these can have relatively high CTRs. This example of CTRs compared a GGoogle Ads campaign provided by Smart Insights Expert commentator David Miles. It shows the uplift he received when testing this new format.

Still deciding where to invest your resources? Structure your marketing plan around a funnel proven to boost performance. Join Smart Insights as a Free Member for instant access to our free digital marketing plan template to hone your skills and drive the results you need.

Free digital marketing plan template

Our popular marketing planning template is structured across the Smart Insights RACE Framework. Join Smart Insights as a Free Member to download our digital marketing plan template today

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What are social media average CTRs - a comparison of Facebook and Twitter?

Again, we will use the Q1 2020 ad benchmark report from AdStage as our primary data source. Here are the media CTRs for their clients in North America:

Facebook ad CTR

The average Facebook CTR in the newsfeed is 1.11%. This is trending downwards; a decrease of 0.37% compared to the previous year.

Other data reported includes:

• CTR on the right side placement averages just 0.16%.
• Facebook Stories have an average CTR of 0.79%.
• Facebook Audience network is 0.69% (mainly used for promoting apps such as gaming apps on publisher sites and in apps). This uses a range of ad formats such as display, native and video.

Instagram ad CTR

Instagram ad clickthrough rate in the feed is 0.22%, significantly lower than in the previous year and much lower compared to Facebook. This reflects the visual nature of Insta which doesn't offer opportunities for CTR in organic newsfeeds (other than Stories). Benchmarks for Stories are a little higher at 0.33%.

LinkedIn Ad CTR

Although the audience is quite different since LinkedIn targets B2B audiences, there is a similar CTR in LinkedIn of 0.22%.

Twitter Ad CTR

Twitter has a higher clickthrough rate, although there is a significant decrease in the last quarter. Fewer impressions are served to Adstage customers in this category so this insight should be treated with caution.

Social media interactions benchmarks

This interesting pie chart comparison from the Social Bakers Q2 Report shows which industries received the most (and least) interactions on Facebook and Instagram in Quarter 2 of 2020. The study was not repeated in the most recent version of the report, however, Social Bakers are now providing detailed industry social media breakdowns for most of the sectors mentioned below.

Other sector/industry social media ads average CTR benchmark data

Other media reporting services like Social Bakers and the Merkle Digital Marketing benchmark reports also have useful reports benchmarking different advertising metrics across organic and paid search (Google Ads) plus different social networks, but don't report absolute CTR probably because this is not permitted by their terms of service with Facebook and Google.  However, if you're involved in improving your ad effectiveness we recommend reviewing the latest:

Historical data for context - comparison of display, search (AdWords) and social ads average CTRs

Since the Google-Doubleclick data is no longer available we're unable to update this data, but we have kept it in this post since it may be useful for readers to understand historic trends in CTR.

This comparison of average online media clickthrough rates from Marin is useful for modelling the response of digital media for top-level budgets.

Facebook ad clickthrough rates by sector

Facebook offers different forms of ad formats with different goals will naturally vary in response as these retail Facebook ads from. You can see that Facebook ad CTRs which may be more highly targeted that display ads have significantly higher CTRs, particularly for Lead generation (i.e. adding subscribers to a retailers email list) and Dynamic Product ads (retargeting visitors who have already visited a site with relevant offers).  

Wordstream also have these summary Facebook ad CTRs by sector:

These Facebook Ad CTRs for different types of ad formats are taken from a test run by Smart Insights contributor Marie Page. They show that by using targeting in Facebook it's possible to improve on general Internet ad clickthough rates.

The challenge of online ad viewabililty

Viewability is another issue for advertisers to consider when evaluating online ad effectiveness as measured by clickthrough rates. Ad blocking also has an impact since ad blockers have increased in popularity across countries and demographics, accounting for 35% of ads in some countries.

Viewability refers to the percentage of ads in a campaign or on a publisher site that are potentially available for clickthrough. Just 44.9% of all ads are clickable according to Google-published viewability data since ads may be below the fold and users do not scroll to see them. This varies across publisher and content category.

Given the impact of viewability and ad blocking on online ad clickthrough rates you can see that there are moves in the industry to only charge for viewable ads, which with increasing options for native advertising will potentially improve the effectiveness of ads.

Variation in online average CTRs for ads by country

This is historic data for reference - for the latest use the interactive Display benchmarking tool.

Source: DoubleClick for Advertisers, a cross section of regions, January and December 2009, Published July 2010

Variation in online average CTRs by ad format

Ad clickthrough rate naturally varies according to placement (position on screen) and ad format (shape and size). The traditional full-banner performs very poorly compared to skyscrapers, the ubiquitous medium rectangle and the newer large rectangle format.

Variation in online ad Interaction Rates by ad format

Interaction rates differ for different ad formats in a similar way to ad formats.

Interaction rate definition:

Interactions are defined as the user does one or more of the following:

• Mouses over the ad for 1 continuous second
• Clicks an Exit link
• Makes the ad display in Full Screen mode
• Expands the ad