Search and the web
The share of appearances that produced a click — and a rate that falls when a site starts being shown for more things.
Also called CTR · Кликабельность
Formula
CTR = Clicks ÷ Impressions
- Clicks
- clicks on your result, as counted by the search engine
- Impressions
- appearances in a result set, at any position
Because the denominator counts appearances at every rank, CTR is dominated by where you appear. A site whose impressions grow at low positions reports a falling CTR while nothing about it got worse — the rate is describing the mix, not the listing.
CTR is the one search metric that can be moved by rewriting rather than by earning — a title and description that match the question get chosen more often at the same rank. That is real and it is small: worth having once a page is on the first page, worth nothing below it.
It is also the metric most damaged by aggregation. A single CTR across a whole site averages branded queries, where it is very high, with everything else, where it is not. The branded share alone can move the site figure by several points without a single non-branded listing changing.
- Impressions
- 1,950
- Clicks
- 6
- Average position
- 35.9
- Queries with at least one impression
- 192
CTR = 6 ÷ 1,950 = 0.3%. The honest reading is not that the listings are poorly written. It is that an average position of 35.9 is the fourth page, where the click-through rate of any listing is close to zero. Quoting the 1,950 without the 35.9 would describe a site being found; the two together describe a site being considered and not seen.
The usual cause is success at the previous step. A site that starts ranking for a wider set of queries collects those impressions at low positions first, which lowers the rate. Split branded from non-branded and split by position band before concluding anything; a single site-wide CTR is almost never a statement about any page.
Quantities derived from the counts. Each is only as sound as the definitions beneath it.
Cannot be computed without
- Impression
- One appearance of your page in a result set a person was served — counted whether or not they ever scrolled far enough to see it.
- Click
- A click on your result in a search engine. It is not a session in your analytics, and the two will never reconcile.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.