CTR calculator
Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. Type impressions and clicks for the rate, or a rate and one of the others to find the third.
Under it: the formula, worked examples, where a click rate usually lands on each channel, what a good one is, how to raise it, and the one benchmark on this site that is not a rule of thumb: the click rate of the top of the board, read live.
About one person in 83 who saw it clicked.
Where a click rate usually lands by channel. Rules of thumb, wide on purpose.
What click-through rate is
Click-through rate is the share of the people who saw a placement who clicked it. Two hundred clicks on twenty thousand impressions is a click rate of one percent. It is the first honest number in any campaign, because it is the first one that depends on a person doing something rather than a platform counting something.
It measures the creative and the audience together and nothing else. A high click rate says the right people saw the right message; it says nothing about the page they landed on or whether they bought anything, which is what conversion rate is for. A campaign can have a superb click rate and lose money, and often does.
The CTR formula
CTR = (clicks / impressions) x 100.
- Clicks = impressions x (CTR / 100). What a rate will produce from a known number of showings.
- Impressions = clicks / (CTR / 100). How many showings a target number of clicks needs.
The calculator solves whichever field is empty. It is the same arithmetic the impressions calculator runs when it turns a budget into a click count.
Worked examples
| Impressions | Clicks | CTR | One click for every |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200,000 | 900 | 0.45% | 222 people who saw it |
| 80,000 | 1,000 | 1.25% | 80 people |
| 20,000 | 1,100 | 5.5% | 18 people |
| 50,000 | 600 | 1.2% | 83 people |
| 1,000,000 | 2,000 | 0.2% | 500 people |
The last column is the one to keep in mind. A click rate of 0.2% sounds like a rounding error and is one click for every five hundred people, which on a million impressions is two thousand visits. Small percentages of large numbers are how display works.
CTR benchmarks by channel
Where most reports put the average click rate for 2025 and 2026. The channels differ by a factor of twenty, which is the whole reason a click rate is only ever compared with the same channel's.
| Channel | Typical CTR | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Display | 0.3% to 0.7% | Nobody came to the page for the placement; the click is an interruption accepted |
| 0.4% to 0.8% | A feed read at work, by people who are cautious about what they click there | |
| Facebook and Instagram | 0.9% to 1.8% | Feed placements with a picture and fine targeting |
| 2% to 3.5% | Clicks as a share of delivered mail, to people who asked to hear from you | |
| Google Search | 3% to 7% | The person typed the need and the placement is the answer; brand terms run far higher |
The calculator places your rate against these. A rate below the band for its channel points at the creative or the audience; a rate far above it, on display in particular, sometimes points at accidental clicks, which show up as a bounce rate near a hundred percent on the page behind them.
What a good click-through rate is
One above the average for its channel, on a page that converts. The second half matters as much as the first: a click rate can be raised by promising something the page does not deliver, and the extra clicks cost money and produce nothing.
A good click rate is also stable. Every creative fades as the same audience sees it again, and a rate that was two percent in the first week and half that in the fourth is not a two percent creative; it is a creative that needs replacing on a schedule.
How to raise a click rate
- Say the specific thing. A placement that names a price, a number or an outcome is clicked more than one that names a category.
- Match the audience to the message. Most low click rates are the right message in front of the wrong people, and the fix is targeting, not copy.
- Rotate the creative before it fades. A fresh creative to the same audience restores most of the rate the old one lost.
- Put the placement where people come to look at placements. A leaderboard of brands is read as a list, top to bottom, by people who arrived to see who is on it. That is the reason the board's own click rate is on this page.
The click rate of the top of The Board, live
Every benchmark above is a rule of thumb. The panel under the calculator is not: it reads the brand holding rank 01 right now, the impressions that position has been served since the brand took it, and the clicks those impressions produced, and divides one by the other. That is the click rate of the most-seen position on the board today, from a real count.
Impressions on a listing are counted when it is on a visitor's screen and deduplicated per visitor per day. Clicks go out through the board's own redirect and fire an event in Fathom under the brand's name, so the count exists somewhere that is not here.
Questions people ask about a ctr calculator
How do you calculate click-through rate?
What is a good CTR?
Is a 2% CTR good?
What is the difference between CTR and conversion rate?
Why is my CTR dropping?
How many clicks will 100,000 impressions produce?
Does CTR affect what I pay?
How is CTR counted on The Board?
More free tools
All of them are on the free tools page. Every one is free, asks for no account, and stores nothing of yours on our side. A listing on The Board is a logo, a line and a link, from $1, and every number on the board is public.