Metrics
What is click-through rate (CTR)?
Click-through rate is one of the easiest marketing numbers to calculate and one of the easiest to misread. The arithmetic takes a sentence. Knowing what a given number means takes the rest of this page.
What is click-through rate?
Click-through rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, written as a percentage, so fifty clicks from a thousand impressions is a 5% click-through rate.
Paid and organic click-through rates are calculated the same way but mean different things, because a paid impression is an ad that was served while an organic impression is a listing that appeared somewhere on a results page the person may never have scrolled to. A high rate is only good news when the people clicking are the people you want, so it is always read next to conversion rate rather than on its own.
The arithmetic, and what each half means
Clicks divided by impressions. The interesting part is not the division, it is what your platform counts as an impression, because that is what decides whether the number means anything.
An impression is one instance of your listing, ad or email being served. A click is somebody acting on it. Divide one by the other, multiply by a hundred, and you have a percentage that describes how often being seen turns into being visited.
Read the full breakdown: The arithmetic, and what each half meansHide the full breakdown: The arithmetic, and what each half means
The number shows up in almost every marketing tool: Google Ads reports it per keyword and per ad, Search Console reports it per query and per page, email platforms report it per send, and social platforms report their own version with their own definition of a view. They are not directly comparable and treating them as one metric is the most common way the number misleads people.
Used properly, click-through rate answers one narrow question: given that we were in front of this person, did the wording and the context earn a visit? It says nothing at all about whether that visit was worth having.
That is why it belongs in a pair. Click-through rate tells you about the listing. Conversion rate tells you about what happened afterwards. Either one alone can be improved in ways that damage the other.
Paid and organic click-through rates are not the same measurement
In Google Ads, an impression means your ad was served on a results page. The ad was in a specific slot, usually near the top, and the number of people who genuinely had a chance to see it is high. A paid click-through rate is therefore a reasonably tight measure of how persuasive the ad was.
In Search Console, an impression means your page appeared in results for that query, including positions well down the page that the searcher may never have scrolled to. A page sitting in the lower half of the first page can accumulate thousands of impressions from people who never looked at it. Its organic click-through rate is mostly a statement about where it ranked, not about how the title was written.
Read the full breakdown: Paid and organic click-through rates are not the same measurementHide the full breakdown: Paid and organic click-through rates are not the same measurement
That single difference explains most of the confusion around this metric. A 6% paid click-through rate and a 6% organic click-through rate describe completely different situations, and averaging them or comparing them tells you nothing.
There is a second complication on the organic side. You control the title and the description you supply, but Google may rewrite the snippet it shows, generating its own text when it judges that a better fit for the query. So an organic click-through rate is partly a measure of wording you did not write.
The practical rule: compare paid click-through rate against other ads, and organic click-through rate against the same page's own history and against the position it held at the time.
What actually counts as an impression
A results page is made of several different surfaces, and appearing on it can mean very different amounts of attention depending on which one you appeared in.
This is why an organic click-through rate cannot be read without its position. The same page, same title, same query, will show a completely different rate depending on whether it sat above or below the fold that day.
It is also why a sudden drop in organic click-through rate with steady impressions is usually not a copywriting problem. Something above you changed: a new ad, an AI answer, a competitor's rich result, or a set of map listings pushing everything down.
For a local business, the map results are often the surface that matters most, and they are reported separately from organic web results. A business can have a mediocre organic click-through rate and still be capturing most of the local demand through a profile that never appears in that number at all.
What paid click-through rates tend to look like
LocalIQ's Search Advertising Benchmarks 2026 aggregate campaigns run by their own customers across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Use them to sanity check a number, not as a market average and not as a target anybody should commit to.
SourceLocalIQ, Search Advertising Benchmarks 2026
Read all three together. An account beating the click-through rate and missing the conversion rate is attracting the wrong people efficiently, which costs more than a quiet ad does.
Why there is no organic click-through rate table on this page
Search for organic click-through rate and you will find several confident tables claiming exactly what share of clicks each ranking position earns. We are not reproducing one, and the reason is worth explaining because it tells you something about how to read marketing statistics generally.
The widely circulated tables come from different publishers, measure different sets of queries over different periods, and disagree with one another by very large margins for the same position. Not by a point or two, by multiples. A figure that changes that much depending on who measured it is not a benchmark. It is a guess carrying decimal places for credibility.
Read the full breakdown: Why there is no organic click-through rate table on this pageHide the full breakdown: Why there is no organic click-through rate table on this page
None of them is a primary source we can hand you and say read this yourself, which is the test every number on this site has to pass.
What we can tell you is well sourced and more useful anyway. SparkToro's 2026 analysis of a Similarweb clickstream panel found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click, up from 60.45% on the same measure in 2024. Ahrefs' 2026 study of 300,000 keywords, comparing aggregated Search Console data from December 2023 with December 2025, found the average click-through rate of the top ranking page was 58% lower when an AI Overview was present.
Those two findings do more for a decision than any position table would. They say the denominator is growing while the clicks are not, and that anybody quoting you a fixed click share for a ranking position is quoting a world that has changed underneath them.
The organic click-through rate that actually matters to you is your own, per query and per page, in Search Console, compared against itself over time.
In paid search, click-through rate is an input as well as an output
Most metrics only describe what happened. This one also feeds back into what happens next, which is why it gets more attention in advertising than its reliability alone would justify.
Quality Score is reported at keyword level on a scale of one to ten and is built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google is explicit that Quality Score is not itself an input in the auction, it is a diagnostic for identifying where the experience is weak.
The word expected is doing real work there. Google is estimating how likely your ad is to be clicked, adjusted for position, rather than simply reading your historical rate. An ad in a lower slot is not penalised for the clicks it never had a chance to receive.
Read the full breakdown: In paid search, click-through rate is an input as well as an outputHide the full breakdown: In paid search, click-through rate is an input as well as an output
The practical takeaway is that improving relevance tends to improve several things at once: more clicks for the same impressions, a better diagnostic reading, and more competitive positioning without raising bids. That is a real feedback loop and it is the main reason paid search rewards tight ad groups.
What it is not is a licence to chase clicks. An ad written to maximise clicks rather than qualified clicks will succeed at exactly that, and the cost shows up one column to the right.
When a high click-through rate is bad news
A rising click-through rate is reported as a win by almost every dashboard. These are the situations where it is the opposite.
- The ad implies something the business does not do, so people click, discover the mismatch and leave.
- The campaign is dominated by searches for your own business name, which convert brilliantly and represent no new demand.
- An offer is stated in a way that attracts price shoppers who never had the budget for the actual service.
- The words free or cheap are carrying the ad, and the enquiries arriving cannot be converted into paying work.
- Curiosity phrasing is pulling clicks from people researching a subject rather than looking to hire anybody.
- The click-through rate rose because impressions collapsed, which makes the ratio look better while the account reaches fewer people.
- In email, a rate climbs because the list shrank to the most engaged contacts rather than because the content improved.
In every one of those cases the fix is upstream of the wording: targeting, match types, negative keywords, or a clearer statement of who the service is for.
How to find your own numbers
Your own historical rates are worth more than any published average, because they already account for your market, your position and your category.
Open Search Console for the organic picture
The performance report gives clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, filterable by query, by page, by country and by device. Start by filtering to your highest impression pages and sorting by click-through rate ascending. Those are the listings appearing often and being ignored.
Separate brand queries from everything else
Filter out your business name before you draw any conclusion. Brand searches click at a far higher rate than anything else and will hide whatever is happening on the queries that represent new customers.
Read paid click-through rate at ad group level, not account level
An account average blends brand campaigns, competitor campaigns and generic service campaigns that behave nothing alike. The useful comparison is between ads inside one ad group, where the searches are consistent.
See the remaining steps: How to find your own numbersHide the remaining steps: How to find your own numbers
Always pull conversion rate alongside it
Never look at one without the other. The pairing is what distinguishes a listing that earns the right visits from one that simply earns visits, and it takes the same two clicks to retrieve.
Compare against your own history and note what changed above you
Keep a short log of results page changes you observe for your main queries: an AI answer appearing, a new advertiser, a competitor gaining a rich result. When the rate moves, that log usually explains it faster than any analysis of your own wording.
A month of your own data beats any industry average, because it is measured on your queries, in your market, at your position.
Metrics that sit next to this one
Click-through rate is never read alone. These are the numbers it belongs beside.
What counts as a good conversion rate
The other half of the pair, and the one that decides whether clicks were worth buying.
What counts as a good conversion rateWhat a marketing KPI actually is
How to pick a small number of measures that describe the business rather than the dashboard.
What a marketing KPI actually isWhat Google Analytics does
Where the behaviour after the click is recorded, and what its definitions really mean.
What Google Analytics doesWriting a Google ad that earns the click
The copy side of this metric, including what Google's editorial policies prohibit.
Writing a Google ad that earns the clickThe full Google Ads guide
Where this metric sits inside a paid search account, and the other numbers it has to be read beside.
The full Google Ads guideWant to know which of your listings are being seen and ignored?
We will pull your own Search Console and Ads data and show you where impressions are not turning into visits, and why.
Straight answers.
How do you calculate click-through rate?
Divide clicks by impressions and multiply by one hundred. Fifty clicks from a thousand impressions is 5%.
The arithmetic never changes. What changes between platforms is the definition of an impression, which is what makes two identical percentages mean different things.
What is a good click-through rate?
For paid search, LocalIQ's 2026 benchmarks put the all industries average at 6.64% across their own customers' campaigns, which is a reference point rather than a target.
For organic results there is no trustworthy universal figure, because the published position tables disagree wildly with each other. Compare your own pages against their own history instead.
Why is my organic click-through rate falling when impressions are up?
Usually because you are appearing for more queries at lower positions, which adds impressions that were never likely to click. The ratio falls while nothing about your listing got worse.
The other common cause is a change above you on the results page. Ahrefs found the top result's average click-through rate was 58% lower when an AI Overview was present, in their 2026 study of 300,000 keywords.
Does click-through rate affect my Google rankings?
Google does not publish click-through rate as a ranking factor, and the topic is one of the most argued about in the industry without a clear public answer.
In paid search the relationship is documented: expected click-through rate is one of the three components Google reports in Quality Score. Treat the paid case as known and the organic case as unproven.
Can I improve click-through rate by rewriting my title tag?
Sometimes, and it is worth testing on pages with high impressions and low clicks. Write the title to match what the searcher asked rather than to include as many keywords as possible.
Be aware that Google may rewrite the snippet it displays, and that meta description text is not a ranking factor, so the effect is on clicks rather than on position.
Is a higher click-through rate always better?
No. An ad or listing that attracts unqualified clicks raises the rate and lowers the return, because every one of those clicks costs either money or attention.
The right pairing is click-through rate with conversion rate. Improving one while the other falls is usually a targeting problem rather than a success.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google Search Console Help: About Search Console (opens in a new tab)
- Google Ads Help: About Quality Score for Search campaigns (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: Control your snippets in search results (opens in a new tab)Google's own statement that it may rewrite a meta description.
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website (opens in a new tab)What Google publishes about AI Overviews and AI Mode, and what it does not.
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews and clickthrough rate, 2026 (300,000 keywords) (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.