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Glossary

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the share of people who click a link, ad, or element out of everyone who saw it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions, times 100. It measures how well a creative or placement earns the next action, one step before the shopper reaches your store.

Click-through rate (CTR)
DefinitionsClick-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the share of people who click a link, ad, or element out of everyone who saw it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions, times 100. It measures how well a creative or placement earns the next action, one step before the shopper reaches your store.

CTR is a relevance signal. A high rate means the message matched what the viewer wanted enough to make them act; a low rate means the creative, the audience, or the placement is off. Because it sits early in the funnel, it tells you quickly whether something is worth more spend or a rethink.

The same word covers a few different things, so always say what you are measuring: ad CTR (clicks on an ad), email CTR (clicks inside an email), or on-site CTR (taps on a banner, a product card, or a video tag). The formula is the same, but the benchmark and the meaning change with context.

A click is not a sale. A creative can win a high CTR and still convert poorly if the page it leads to disappoints. Read CTR next to what happens after the click, conversion rate and add-to-cart rate, so you are improving the whole path and not just the first tap.

On beyondRegular

Inside a beyondRegular widget, CTR usually means the share of viewers who tap a product hotspot in a video, the moment interest turns into a buying step. It tells you which clips and which tagged products actually pull a tap. Read it alongside the add-to-cart and order data the widget attributes per video, so you can tell a clip that gets taps from one that gets taps and sales.

Common questions

What is a good click-through rate?

There is no single good number, because it depends entirely on context. A search ad, a display banner, a marketing email, and a tap on an on-site video tag all sit at very different rates, so comparing across them is meaningless. The useful test is your own trend: did a new creative, audience, or placement move your CTR up against your previous baseline.

How is CTR different from conversion rate?

CTR measures the click: the share of people who saw something and acted on it. Conversion rate measures the purchase: the share of sessions that end in a completed order. CTR is an earlier, upper-funnel signal about whether a creative earns attention; conversion rate is the downstream result that tells you whether that attention turned into revenue.

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