What Is Click-Through Rate?

How Do You Calculate Click-Through Rate?

To calculate click-through rate, you need two pieces of data:

1. The total of ad impressions
2. The total number of clicks to an ad

Let’s look at examples: 

• If an ad has 1,000 impressions and 25 clicked on the call-to-action, the CTR would be 2.5%.
• If there are 1,000 impressions and 303 visitors click on an ad, the CTR would be 30.3%.

Why Is CTR Important?

A CTR reflects a user’s interest in an app. The higher the CTR, the stronger the user intent. It also tells advertisers how well their ads resonate with users. 

Although a CTR will not tell you the quality of traffic ads are driving to your app, it’s still valuable for determining the success or failure of ads – from their creatives, copy, or their placement.

App user acquisition managers can compare the click-through rates of various ad formats – such as video, interstitial, or banner ads – across different advertising channels to determine where they will most likely acquire users. 

If an ad creative is compelling but doesn’t reflect the app in question, advertisers might see a high click-through rate and low installs or engaged users.

What Is a Good Click-Through Rate?

A good click-through rate depends on campaign goals and the benchmarks that exist within an app’s vertical. 

This is because CTR performance is influenced by many external factors, such as the difference in time at which the ad is served, ad formats, and app vertical.

What Else Should I Measure with My CTR?

Besides measuring their app’s CTR, UA teams should check their ad’s conversion rate, installs per mille, and click-to-install rate – as well as in-app behavior, if there was an install. These will tell them

•  how many users engaged with their ad and completed an action
•  the quality of the user, rather than how many clicked on the ad 

This is important, as there can be cases of “accidental” clicks that don’t reflect a user’s intent. For example, an interstitial ad might take up the entire screen, and, in the absence of an exit button, the user accidentally clicks on the ad. These accidental clicks result in inflated CTRs, which will only come to light after analyzing click-to-installs (CTIs).

How Do I Increase My Click-Through Rate?

A high CTR shows that an ad is working. If your CTR is not meeting an advertiser’s KPIs, they can carry out various A/B tests. 

Here are various examples of what teams should test to see whether their CTR improves or worsens:

• Ad creatives: Creatives need to be engaging and relevant to users, so continuously testing elements such as the CTA, copy, and colors is a must. Paying attention to what element of a creative makes it a champion and iterating this element across other campaigns has proven effective at improving CTRs.
• Ad time and frequency: Test when and how often ads should be served.
• Ad format: Some formats attract higher numbers of clicks than others.
• End card: Animated end cards tend to perform better than static end cards.
• Targeting group: Serving ads to the right target audience instead of a broad audience will be more cost-efficient but will also increase CTR.

Conclusion

In mobile adtech, achieving a good click-through rate from ads is useful for gauging initial interest in an app. 

CTR helps app advertisers and user acquisition teams better understand their users. It is a reliable metric to understand user engagement on ads – but not engagement in the apps themselves. This is why monitoring click-through rate will only help UA managers when they are also looking at post-install metrics.

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