CTR Formula – How to Calculate
Most digital advertising units are clickable, and marketers consider it important to determine the clickthrough rate of their ads. The CTR formula below can be used manually or by entering the click and impression numbers into our calculator.
CTR = Clicks / Impressions
Alternatives the CTR Formula Above
Some may wish to define clicks differently, such as unique clicks where users’ clicks are only counted once for a specified ad impression. Feel free to substitute that number into the calculator above and get a proper result.
The denominator, impressions, is often substituted with viewable impressions, video views, email opens, unique users, etc. These can all be interchangeably used in place of impressions as well in our CTR calculator.
Improving Your CTR
Now that you know the CTR of your ad unit or link, you can improve the CTR through split testing. Since attention is a finite resource, it’s important to make the absolute best of your impressions by improving clickthrough rate.
One component of ads and links you can improve is the call to action. This is “why the user should click”. In some cases it’s as simple as telling the user “click here” but in most cases you need to fulfill a specific need of the user viewing your ad or link.
When you’ve nailed down a couple variations, you can attempt to split test either in your ad platform, using a website script of some kind, or a 3rd party tool like Google Optimize. Use one of the A/B testing calculators on our website to measure the significance of your test. If one ad or link has significantly better CTR than the other, you now know how to improve your CTR.