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Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an
online advertising Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
campaign for a particular website, as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.
American Marketing Association The American Marketing Association (AMA) is a professional association for marketing professionals with 30,000 members as of 2012. It has 76 professional chapters and 250 collegiate chapters across the United States. The AMA was formed in from th ...
Dictionary. . Retrieved 2012-11-02. The
Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) The Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), authorized by the Marketing Accountability Foundation,MASB''Marketing Accountability Foundation (MAF)''. ited 8 December 2010/ref> is an independent, private sector, self-governing group of acad ...
endorses this definition as part of its ongoin
Common Language in Marketing Project
Click-through rates for ad campaigns vary tremendously. The first online display ad, shown for
AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...
on the website HotWired in 1994, had a 44% click-through rate. With time, the overall rate of user's clicks on webpage
banner ad A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking ...
s has decreased.


Purpose

The purpose of click-through rates is to measure the ratio of clicks to impressions of an online ad or email marketing campaign. Generally, the higher the CTR, the more effective the marketing campaign has been at bringing people to a website. Most commercial websites are designed to elicit some sort of action, whether it be to buy a book, read a news article, watch a music video, or search for a flight. People rarely visit websites with the intention of viewing advertisements, in the same way that few people watch television to view the commercials.Farris, Paul W.; Neil T. Bendle; Phillip E. Pfeifer; David J. Reibstein (2010). ''Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance.'' Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc. . The
Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) The Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), authorized by the Marketing Accountability Foundation,MASB''Marketing Accountability Foundation (MAF)''. ited 8 December 2010/ref> is an independent, private sector, self-governing group of acad ...
endorses the definitions, purposes, and constructs of classes of measures that appear in ''Marketing Metrics'' as part of its ongoin
Common Language in Marketing Project
While marketers want to know the reaction of the web visitor, with current technology it is nearly impossible to quantify the emotional reaction to the site and the effect of that site on the firm's brand. In contrast, it is easy to determine the click-through rate, which measures the proportion of visitors who clicked on an advertisement that redirected them to another page. Forms of interaction with advertisements other than clicking are possible but rare; "click-through rate" is the most commonly used term to describe the efficacy of an advert.


Construction

The click-through rate of an advertisement is the number of times a click is made on the ad, divided by the number of times the ad is " served", that is, shown (also called impressions), expressed as a percentage: : \text = \times 100 (\%)


Online advertising

Click-through rates for banner ads have decreased over time. When banner ads first started to appear, it was not uncommon to have rates above five percent. They have fallen since then, currently averaging closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent. In most cases, a 2% click-through rate would be considered very successful, though the exact number is hotly debated and would vary depending on the situation. The average click-through rate of 3% in the 1990s declined to 2.4%–0.4% by 2002. Since advertisers typically pay more for a high click-through rate, getting many click-throughs with few purchases is undesirable to advertisers. Similarly, by selecting an appropriate advertising site with high affinity (e.g., a movie magazine for a
movie A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
advertisement), the same banner can achieve a substantially higher CTR. Though personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive ads typically result in higher click-through rates than standard banner ads, overly intrusive ads are often avoided by viewers. Modern online advertising has moved beyond just using banner ads. Popular
search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in ...
allow advertisers to display ads in with the search results triggered by a search user. These ads are usually in text format and may include additional links and information like phone numbers, addresses, and specific product pages.Google Ads: Ad Sitelinks
/ref> This additional information moves away from the poor user experience that can be created from intrusive banner ads and provides useful information to the search user, resulting in higher click-through rates for this format of pay-per-click Advertising. Since CTR is an expression of relevancy of the ads to the user search, higher click-through rates are generally rewarded with a better quality score attributed to the ads, which in turns might lead to lower CPC, therefore incentivising advertisers to continually improve the relevancy of their ads. However, having a high click-through rate isn't the only goal for an online advertiser, who may develop campaigns to raise awareness for the overall gain of valuable traffic, sacrificing some click-through rate for that purpose.


Estimating the Click-Through Rate for Ads

Search engine advertising has become a significant element of the Web browsing experience. Choosing the right ads for the query and the order in which they are displayed greatly affects the probability that a user will see and click on each ad. This ranking has a strong impact on the revenue the search engine receives from the ads. Further, showing the user an ad that they prefer to click on improves user satisfaction. For these reasons, there is an increasing interest in accurately estimating the click-through rate of ads in a
recommender system A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing 'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that provide suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular ...
.


Email

An email click-through rate is defined as the number of recipients who click one or more links in an email and landed on the sender's website, blog, or other desired destination. More simply, email click-through rates represent the number of clicks that your email generated. Email click-through rate is expressed as a percentage, and calculated by dividing the number of click-throughs by the number of tracked message deliveries. Most email marketers use this metrics, along with open rate, bounce rate and other metrics, to understand the effectiveness and success of their email campaign. In general there is no ideal click-through rate. This metric can vary based on the type of email sent, how frequently emails are sent, how the list of recipients is segmented, how relevant the content of the email is to the audience, and many other factors. Even time of day can affect click-through rate. Sunday appears to generate considerably higher click-through rates on average when compared to the rest of the week. Every year, various types of research studies are conducted to track the overall effectiveness of click-through rates in email marketing.


Click-Through Rate and Search Engine Optimization

Some experts on search engine optimization (SEO) have claimed since the mid-2010s that click-through rate has an impact on organic rankings. Numerous case studies have been published to support this theory. Proponents supporting this theory often claim that click-through rate is a ranking signal for Google's RankBrain algorithm. Opponents of this theory claim that the click-through rate has little or no impact on organic rankings. Bartosz Góralewicz published the results of an experiment on Search Engine Land where he claims, "Despite popular belief, click-through rate is not a ranking factor. Even massive organic traffic won’t affect your website’s organic positions." More recently, Barry Schwartz wrote on Search Engine Land, "...Google has said countless times, in writing, at conferences, that CTR is not used in their ranking algorithm.""Google doc rekindles myth that click-through rate affects rankings"
21 Feb 2019


See also

* Abandonment rate * Banner blindness *
Clickbait Clickbait is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise mis ...
*
Click fraud Click, Klick and Klik may refer to: Airlines * Click Airways, a UAE airline * Clickair, a Spanish airline * MexicanaClick, a Mexican airline Art, entertainment, and media Fictional characters * Klick (fictional species), an alien race in th ...
* CTR – Click-through rate * Clicktag * CPA – Cost per acquisition * Cost per action *
Cost per click Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a search engine, website owner, or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is usuall ...
*
Cost per lead Cost per lead, often abbreviated as CPL, is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for an explicit sign-up from a consumer interested in the advertiser's offer. It is also commonly called ''online lead generation''. Co ...
*
Cost per thousand Cost per mille (CPM), also called cost per thousand (CPT) (in Latin, French and Italian, ''mille'' means ''one thousand''), is a commonly-used measurement in advertising. It is the cost an advertiser pays for one thousand views or impressions of ...
* CPI *
eCPA Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) was enacted by the United States Congress to extend restrictions on government wire taps of telephone calls to include transmissions of electronic data by computer ( ''et seq.''), added new pr ...
– effective cost per acquisition/action * Internet marketing * PPC – Pay per click *
View-through rate A view-through rate (VTR), measures the number of post-impression response or viewthrough from display media impressions viewed during and following an online advertising campaign. Such post-exposure behavior can be expressed in site visits, on-sit ...


References


Further reading

*Sherman, Lee and John Deighton, (2001), "Banner advertising: Measuring effectiveness and optimizing placement," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Spring, Vol. 15, Iss. 2. *Ward A. Hanson and Kirthi Kalyanam, (2007), Internet Marketing and eCommerce, Chapter8, Traffic Building, Thomson College Pub, Mason, Ohio.


External links


MASB Official Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Click-Through Rate Advertising indicators Audience measurement Online advertising Email Consumer behaviour Rates