What is a good click-through rate?

It depends so heavily on channel, position and intent that a single benchmark is misleading. Branded search terms routinely clear double digits because the searcher is looking for you by name, while broad display placements often sit well below one percent and are still profitable. The comparison that means something is your own rate for the same placement and audience over time.

Why does my Meta CTR differ so much from my Google CTR?

Because the two are measuring different behaviour and often counting different events. Search reaches people who have just typed a request, so intent is high and rates are high. Feed placements interrupt people doing something else. On top of that, Meta’s all-clicks column includes engagement that never leaves the platform, so make sure you are comparing link clicks against Google clicks.

Does click-through rate affect what I pay?

Indirectly, yes. Both major auctions weight expected engagement when deciding which ad wins and what it costs, so ads that people click tend to win more impressions at lower prices. The effect is real but it is downstream of relevance, and an ad engineered to attract clicks it cannot convert usually costs more overall once the wasted traffic is counted.

Is organic search CTR calculated the same way?

The formula is identical, but the impression is a different event. Search Console counts an impression whenever your listing appeared in results, including positions nobody scrolled to. That makes organic rates for low-ranking pages very small by construction, and it means an organic CTR and a paid CTR should never be averaged together or compared directly.

Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.

Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.

Do I need an account?

No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.

Can I use the output commercially?

Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.

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CTR calculator

Calculate click-through rate from clicks and impressions, or solve for either one behind a rate. Explains which click column to use, since platforms differ.

Solve for

Your numbers

Clicks

Clicks of the kind you care about. On Meta that means link clicks, not the wider clicks-all column. Enter it a whole number.

Impressions

Times the ad or listing was shown, over the same date range as the clicks. Enter it a whole number.

Click-through rate

0.7%

0.7% of impressions turned into a click. Read it as a measure of how well the creative and the targeting agree with each other.

The sum this ran

Click-through rate = (Clicks ÷ Impressions) × 100

Everything here runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, which matters when the inputs are spend, revenue and margin.

Which clicks the platform is counting

CTR is trivial arithmetic sitting on top of a definition that changes between platforms and between columns in the same report. Before dividing anything, establish which of your platform’s click counts you have picked up.

Meta reports link clicks and an all-clicks column separately. All-clicks includes reactions, comments, profile taps and expanding the caption, so a CTR built on it can be several times the link CTR and describes something else entirely.
Google Ads counts a click as an interaction that sends someone to your destination. Extensions and sitelinks generate their own clicks, which is why an ad group CTR and a keyword CTR rarely reconcile neatly.
Search Console reports an organic CTR against impressions of a listing in the results, where an impression can mean appearing on page four. Organic CTR and paid CTR should never appear in the same average.
Email CTR is conventionally clicks over emails delivered, while click-to-open rate divides by opens instead. Open tracking has been unreliable since mail privacy protection began prefetching images, which makes the second figure the shakier of the two.

The exact sums this page runs

The same identity arranged three ways, which is what makes this useful for planning rather than only for reporting. Solve for impressions when you have a click target, then price those impressions with a CPM.

Click-through rate = (Clicks ÷ Impressions) × 100. The default: what share of the times you were shown produced a click.
Clicks to expect = (Click-through rate × Impressions) ÷ 100. Forecasting: apply a rate you have already measured to a planned volume of impressions.
Impressions needed = (Clicks × 100) ÷ Click-through rate. Working backwards from a click target, which is the first step in sizing a media budget.

Reading a rate without fooling yourself

A CTR is a ratio of two numbers that both move for reasons unrelated to your creative. These are the checks worth running before you conclude an ad is working.

Position dominates on search. The same ad at the top of the page and halfway down it produces very different rates, so a CTR change with no creative change is usually an auction position change.
Frequency erodes it. A campaign left running against a fixed audience will show a falling CTR purely because the same people have now seen the ad repeatedly.
Audience width works in the opposite direction from volume. A tightly targeted campaign can post an excellent CTR on a pool too small to matter commercially.
Compare formats only against themselves. Video, carousel and static placements collect clicks under different rules, and averaging across them produces a number with no natural comparison.

CTR is a signal, not an objective

Click-through rate measures whether people found the promise interesting enough to act on. It says nothing about whether the promise was accurate, which is why it is an excellent diagnostic and a poor target.

Chasing CTR rewards curiosity gaps and overstated claims, which raise clicks and lower conversion rate at the same time. The spend goes up and the sales do not.
The useful pairing is CTR against conversion rate. High clicks with low conversion means the ad and the landing page are promising different things.
Both Google and Meta factor expected engagement into what you pay, so a genuinely strong CTR does tend to lower costs. That is a side effect of relevance, not a reason to manufacture clicks.
On very low volumes the rate is noise. Twenty clicks on two thousand impressions has a wide enough margin of error that ranking two ads by it is close to a coin toss.

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Frequently asked questions

How this tool works, what it cannot do, and what happens to what you put into it.

What is a good click-through rate?
It depends so heavily on channel, position and intent that a single benchmark is misleading. Branded search terms routinely clear double digits because the searcher is looking for you by name, while broad display placements often sit well below one percent and are still profitable. The comparison that means something is your own rate for the same placement and audience over time.
Why does my Meta CTR differ so much from my Google CTR?
Because the two are measuring different behaviour and often counting different events. Search reaches people who have just typed a request, so intent is high and rates are high. Feed placements interrupt people doing something else. On top of that, Meta’s all-clicks column includes engagement that never leaves the platform, so make sure you are comparing link clicks against Google clicks.
Does click-through rate affect what I pay?
Indirectly, yes. Both major auctions weight expected engagement when deciding which ad wins and what it costs, so ads that people click tend to win more impressions at lower prices. The effect is real but it is downstream of relevance, and an ad engineered to attract clicks it cannot convert usually costs more overall once the wasted traffic is counted.
Is organic search CTR calculated the same way?
The formula is identical, but the impression is a different event. Search Console counts an impression whenever your listing appeared in results, including positions nobody scrolled to. That makes organic rates for low-ranking pages very small by construction, and it means an organic CTR and a paid CTR should never be averaged together or compared directly.
Is my data private?
Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.
Is this really free?
Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.
Do I need an account?
No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.
Can I use the output commercially?
Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.