Short answer: it depends entirely on where you measure it. In Google Search the average is around 6%, in the Meta feed it sits between 0.9% and 1.8%, and on display it falls below 0.1%. CTR (click-through rate) is the percentage of times someone clicks on your ad out of the total times it was shown: CTR = clicks / impressions x 100. If your ad is shown 20,000 times and receives 240 clicks, its CTR is 1.2%.
Comparing a CTR figure against a different network, or against a cross-industry average, is the fastest way to reach the wrong conclusion. The only reference that actually drives a decision is your own CTR, segmented by campaign type and read as a trend over time.
The formula and what CTR actually measures
CTR = clicks / impressions x 100
What it measures is not "interest": it measures the fit between what you promise and what the person was looking for at that moment. That is why the same ad produces different CTRs depending on who sees it, and why CTR is the first metric to check when something moves: it is the part of the funnel you control entirely, because it depends on your creative, your copy and your targeting — not on the auction.
Its real importance is that it is the hinge between what the audience costs and what the visit costs you: CPC = CPM / (CTR x 1,000). Doubling CTR with the same CPM halves your CPC without touching a single bid. That is the whole reason CTR matters in paid media: not the number itself, but because it is the multiplier that decides how much traffic you buy with the same budget.
What is a good CTR on each channel
These are the ranges we use as a starting point, not as targets. They are useful for detecting something is broken, not for deciding whether a campaign is working:
- Google Ads, Search: average around 6%. Brand campaigns easily reach 15–30% (people searching your name already want you) while generic head terms sit between 2% and 5%. Below 2% on generic terms there is usually a match type or ad copy problem.
- Google Shopping: between 0.6% and 1.5%, driven more by the product image and price relative to competitors than by any text.
- Meta Ads, feed and reels, prospecting: between 0.9% and 1.8% on link clicks. In retargeting, double or triple that is normal.
- Display and Demand Gen: between 0.05% and 0.5%. Here a high CTR is more suspicious than it is good news.
- LinkedIn Ads: between 0.4% and 0.8%. It is an expensive network with a structurally low CTR: cost per lead matters far more than CTR.
- Email: be careful with this one, because here CTR is calculated over delivered emails, not opens. A 2–3% on a well-maintained list is normal.
- Organic results (Search Console): almost entirely determined by position. Position 1 captures 25–40%, position 3 is around 10%, and from position 7 onwards it falls below 3%.
How to use this table correctly: if your Search CTR on generic campaigns is 0.8%, you do not need to think hard — something is wrong (broad match without negatives, ads that do not echo the query, or no extensions configured). If it is 4%, the table no longer tells you anything useful and the relevant comparison shifts to your own campaigns over time.
The Meta CTR almost nobody reads correctly
Meta reports two metrics with nearly identical names and the difference between them breaks any analysis:
- CTR (all): includes reactions, comments, clicks on the page name, image expansions and "see more". It is an inflated number that has nothing to do with the traffic reaching your website.
- CTR (link clicks): only the times someone actually clicks the link to your destination. It is the only one that works for judging creative and the only one that fits the CPC formula.
The gap between the two is not cosmetic: on highly social creatives, the "all" CTR can be three times the link CTR. If you compare the CTR of one campaign measured as "all" against another measured as link clicks, you will reach the opposite conclusion. Before reading any CTR figure in Meta, check which one is in the column.
The same care applies when comparing across platforms: Google Search CTR counts clicks that go to your website, so it is directly comparable to Meta link CTR — never to the "all" figure.
When a high CTR is a bad sign
CTR is easy to push up while making the account worse. These are the four cases we see most often:
- Brand traffic disguised as prospecting. This is the number-one case. If a prospecting campaign includes an audience that already knows you (site visitors, customer list, brand search traffic), the average CTR rises and masks the fact that cold traffic is not working. Separating brand from generic campaigns is not a reporting quirk: without that separation, CTR lies.
- A promise the landing page does not keep. An aggressive discount or an eye-catching figure in the headline raises CTR and tanks conversion. The signal is unmistakable: CTR up, cost per conversion flat or worse, bounce rate spiking.
- Accidental clicks. Ad formats with an ambiguous click area — especially on mobile and in low-quality inventory — produce great CTRs with two-second sessions.
- Tiny audiences. A 6% CTR on 300 impressions is not a data point, it is noise. Below a few thousand impressions the confidence interval is too wide to support any decision.
The reading rule: a high CTR is only good news if cost per conversion has fallen with it. If CTR rises 50% and CPA stays the same, you have bought more clicks, not better customers.
How to improve CTR, ranked by impact
Ordered by what actually moves the number, highest to lowest:
- Change who sees it. The same ad in front of a well-chosen audience performs several times better. In Search that means cleaning search terms and adding negatives; in Meta, it means stopping the habit of targeting by intuition and letting the system find the audience using a creative that filters it on its own.
- Refresh creative before it burns out. CTR declining with a flat CPM is fatigue, and it always comes. A steady cadence of new creatives is what sustains CTR over a quarter; waiting for the drop before reacting costs you two weeks of expensive CPC.
- Put the search term in the headline. In Search this is the cheapest and most reliable change that exists. An ad that literally echoes what the person typed wins the click, and the same principle holds in organic: a title that matches the query exactly lifts CTR immediately.
- Occupy more space in the SERP. All active extensions (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, image, price) push competitors' results down and raise CTR without touching the ad itself.
- Rewrite the first line. In Meta, the first line of the primary text and the first three seconds of the video are where the decision happens. The rest of the copy barely participates.
One caveat on bidding: with automated strategies (maximise conversions, target CPA, target ROAS) the system optimises for conversion, not CTR, so you will see profitable campaigns with mediocre CTR and high-CTR campaigns that do not sell. In that context CTR is a diagnostic tool for creative quality — not a yardstick for the campaign overall.
Frequently asked questions
What is CTR?
CTR (click-through rate) is the percentage of times someone clicks on an ad or a search result out of the total times it was shown. It is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions and multiplying by 100: 240 clicks on 20,000 impressions gives a CTR of 1.2%.
What is a good CTR?
It depends on the channel. In Google Search the average is around 6%, and brand campaigns easily exceed 15%. In the Meta feed, a link CTR between 0.9% and 1.8% is normal for prospecting. In display and Demand Gen you are below 0.5%, and on LinkedIn between 0.4% and 0.8%. Comparing across different networks makes no sense: the useful reference is your own CTR per campaign type, read as a trend.
How is CTR calculated?
CTR = clicks / impressions x 100. In Meta, make sure you are using link CTR and not the "all clicks" CTR, because the latter includes reactions, comments and image expansions that send no traffic to your website and can be three times the link figure.
Does a high CTR mean the campaign is working?
Not on its own. CTR goes up when brand audiences bleed into prospecting campaigns, when the ad promises something the landing page does not deliver, or when there are accidental clicks on cheap inventory — and in all three cases the cost per conversion does not improve. A high CTR is only a good signal if CPA or CAC falls with it.
What is the relationship between CTR and CPC?
It is direct and inverse: CPC = CPM / (CTR x 1,000). With the same audience cost, doubling CTR cuts CPC in half. So when CPC rises, the first thing to check is whether CPM is stable: if it is, what happened is that CTR has dropped and the problem is in the creative or the audience fit, not in the auction.
What is a good organic CTR in Google?
In organic results CTR is driven almost entirely by position: position 1 captures between 25% and 40% of clicks, position 3 is around 10%, and from position 7 onwards it falls below 3%. That is why, in Search Console, a page with many impressions and almost no clicks does not always have a title problem — check the average position first.
Plenty of impressions but very few clicks?
The viability audit breaks down CTR by campaign, by audience and by creative, and tells you whether what is failing is the message or who you are showing it to. Free, no strings attached.