What is a Click-Through Rate (CTR)?

CTR is one of the key metrics of measure the impact of organic search traffic on a business. With thousand of organic visitors, businesses build brand value and user engagement.

A click through rate, abbreviated as CTR, is a measurement of how many times a link that is involved in paid inclusion is actually clicked on when it appears on a search engine results page.

The click through rate is measured by dividing the number of times a link appears on a search engine results page by the number of times it is actually clicked on by a visitor. For example, if a link appears one hundred times, or has what is called one hundred impressions, and it is clicked on twenty times, the click through rate of that particular link is twenty percent.

The higher at CTR is for a website means the more people that are seeing the web page, and more conversions that could possibly happen, depending on how well the web page convinces people to partake in the chosen action for that particular landing page. Attractive search results, especially those with images and well-written meta-descriptions, are much more likely to attract visitors.

Banner ads have click through rates as well, though these are becoming obsolete. Most banner ads have a click through rate of less than one percent, and are rarely chosen as standard paid inclusion tactics. Yet, improving click through rates is as easy as placing the banner on specific web pages. Those banner ads which are located on web pages that have something to do with what the banner is advertising have a higher click through rate than other banner ads. Many advertisers choose to simply go with paid inclusion through search engines though, and work on using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve click through rates.

SEO has an effect on click through rates as much as the description tags do. When a link has a description tag that is optimized for natural search engine results, the chances of the click through rate being higher grows. Descriptions that list the target keywords or keyword phrases, as well as descriptions that are well written and concise can draw a visitor to click on that particular link more frequently. A higher click through rate mixed with search engine optimization can be exactly what a web site needs to have a higher conversion rate.

Key Terms

Click-Through Rate: The number of clicks compared to the total number of search impressions.

Goals: A marketing objective for your audience to complete, such as subscribing to a mailing list.

Completion rate: The number of web visitors divided by the number of goals completed.

Organic Traffic: Visitors that discover your website by entering searching a keyword in a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and that click on your listing.

What Does Bounce Rate Mean for SEO?

Bounce rates are a really important metric for any website.

If you have any kind of analytics for your website, including Google Analytics, one of the metrics is reports to you is the bounce rate. So what is bounce rate and why should you care?

"Bounce rate is the percentage of users who view only one page of your website and then leave the website."

Why we care about bounce rate?

Bounce rate is one metric that helps to suggest how useful users are finding our site. If our bounce rate is very high that tends to indicate that our site as a whole isn’t very useful — possibly because it doesn’t contain the information the user was searching for, the information wasn’t easy enough to find, or because the site is hard to read (poor site design, cluttered with ads, etc.).

A high bounce rate can suggest several potential issues, including:

1. Bounce rate could suggest our site is optimized for a poor keyword — users entering that keyword into search engines are actually looking for something other than what our site offers.

2. Bounce rate could suggest the page of your site that shows up in search results is not the page with the information the user was seeking, so they went back to the next site on the search engine list rather than navigating through our site to find the information. This is the danger of centering all our SEO efforts on the home page of our site, rather than on landing pages.

3. Bounce rate could suggest our site could actually provide exactly the information that the user was seeking, so completely that they have no need or interest in anything else on our site (they searched for “how many centimeters in an inch” and our site said 2.54. That’s all they need.)

4. Bounce rate could suggest our site has poor navigation, and/or poor internal linking. The page could have been just fine, but there was nothing to really motivate the user to keep looking around.

5. Bounce rate could suggest your site has poor design. A crummy looking site can have a powerful ability to chase people away.

In general we want users to view more than just one page of our site. We want our site to entice them to follow the links within our site and explore more of our content. We will very rarely get a sale or conversion from someone who only viewed one page of our site.

What is a good bounce rate?

Bounce rates vary wildly from industry to industry. What is a good bounce rate for your industry and your neighbor’s industry are going to be very different. Blogs in particular tend to have higher bounce rates, since readers tend to show up to read the most recent post, and then they’re all caught up.

We can, however, make some broad generalizations about bounce rates.

For the most part, any bounce rate over 70% is considered a high bounce rate, and a high bounce rate is bad. At that point there’s probably something wrong with our site, or we have links pointing to our site when our site has nothing to do with those links. A bounce rate higher than 70% is usually an indication of trouble.

Bounce rates under 50% are generally considered very good bounce rates indeed. It sounds a bit strange to suggest that if half the people coming to our site leave right away then we’re doing great, but it’s true. Bounce rates as low as 40% or 30% are pretty spectacularly awesome.

Most sites experience bounce rates between 50% and 60%, and these are considered perfectly fine bounce rates. It’s always a good idea to continually improve your site to reduce bounce rates, but you generally should not be alarmed at bounce rates in the 50% – 60% range.