Click-Through Rate (CTR)
People worry about email open rates but there is another metric that we want to concentrate on is the click-through rate. CTR is one of the metrics for measuring engagement within an email campaign.
We will cover the followings:
- What is Click-Through Rate?
- How to Calculate Click-Through Rate?
- Why You Have to Measure CTR?
- What is a Good Click-Through Rate?
- How to Improve Click-Through Rate?
- Click-Through Rate in Email Marketing
- Conversion Rate vs. Click-Through Rate
What is Click-Through Rate? 🖱️
Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of prospects who clicks on a link that you sent to the number of total users who view a web page. It is commonly used to measure the success of a marketing campaign for a website as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns. These clicks tell you if your marketing campaign was engaging enough to not only entice an open, but also action from your audience.
The main goal of the click-through rate is to measure engagement. Using CTR, you can gauge performance in the following areas:
- Email content
- Link placement
- Link count
- Brand interest and email fatigue
- Media type
How to Calculate Click-Through Rate? 🤓
To calculate CTR, take the number of clicks your email received divided by the number of times your email was successfully delivered and multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
So the CTR equation should look like the following:
For example, if an email has been clicked on 200 times after being served 1000 times, by multiplying that result by 100 you get a click-through rate of
CTR = (200/1000) x 100
CTR = 20 %
Why You Have to Measure CTR? 🙄
Click-through rate is important to your business because it directly affects your quality score.
Click-through rate is an important metric because it helps you understand your audience, which explains to you what works and what doesn’t when trying to reach your target audience. A low CTR could indicate that you are targeting the wrong prospects or that you are not speaking their need persuasively enough to convince them to click.
Let’s take an example of a paid search ad campaign that directs people to your company website, an e-commerce store, or landing page. A CTR helps you to know how effective the campaign is at drawing in potential customers and you can compare campaigns copy, positions, and CTAs to see which makes the highest CTR.
What is a Good Click-Through Rate? 😇
CTR varies between industries, set of keywords you are bidding on, and individual campaigns within a PPC account. To identify a good click-through rate for your business, you could start by researching your industry’s average click-through rate.
Once you have a clear understanding of existing standards and industry averages, you can begin taking steps to get a higher CTR and reach your business goals.
The average CTR in Google AdWords is 1.91% for search networks and 0.35% for display networks. But the average is not enough to be successful. A good Google AdWords click-through rate is 4 – 5% on the search and 0.5 – 1% on the display.
How to Improve Click-Through Rate? 🔥
There are many factors to consider when you are trying to increase CTR across different marketing channels. The question is how you increase CTR depends on where you want to increase CTR.
For example, if you have a low CTR on a social media channel like Facebook or Twitter, consider which hashtags might help you to reach your targeted audience. If you are trying to increase CTR on a PPC ad, you need to pay close attention to your headline and copy.
Like that you have many factors for different CTR. Here are the four factors to consider when you are trying to improve CTR in common:
- Optimize Your Copy and Headline 📰
Use one or more keywords in your copy and headline that appeal to your audience’s emotions and needs. Also, solve a problem for them. - Add CTAs 📌
Write a direct and compelling Call-To-Action. Your CTA should be inviting and compel your audience to click. - Use images 🖼
Using images is a great way to increase CTR. When it comes to marketing channels, different types of images may perform better than one another. So run A/B tests with different types of images to find out which works best for your business. - Use more Hashtags #️⃣
Hashtags works on multiple platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Do some research on trending or popular hashtags in your industry, and use hashtags that relate to your copy to increase the chances of being seen by the target audience.
Click-Through Rate in Email Marketing 📧
Click-through rates are calculated in much the same way for emails, but instead of an impression being served and clicked on a website, you would consider the percentage of times an email recipient clicks on one or more links in an email to be sent to the recipient’s website or other destination.
It is easy to understand the total number of clicks an email has generated for its recipient. Email marketers combine and compare click-through rates with open rates, bounce rates, and other measurements to calculate the effectiveness of their campaigns.
The difference between an email delivered and an email sent is subtle but significant. The CTR of emails sent will always yield a less than or equal to the using emails delivered. This is because the metric of emails sent doesn’t count for bounces, and therefore will e greater. Emails delivered are the emails sent less than the number of bounces.
Conversion Rate vs. Click-Through Rate 🥊
A click-through rate means that lots of users are clicking on an ad or email, but it doesn’t inform the user about the number of sales the ad or email ultimately generates by leading to purchases.
For this reason, the conversion rate is the percentage of click-through actions that lead to actual sales which may be a more useful metric of a marketing campaign success.
Conclusion
Now that you are learned what CTR is, how to calculate it, and why it is important for emails. You are ready to implement this metric into your next campaign analysis. Analytics plays an important role in any marketing campaign and it is always important to keep best practices at the forefront of your mind.
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