Glossary /Measurement
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Clicks divided by impressions: the share of people who saw a listing and chose it over everything else on the page.
CTR measures whether a listing earns the click once it has been shown. Because it is normalised by impressions it is comparable in a way raw traffic is not, and it isolates the part of performance that copy controls rather than the part that ranking controls.
It has to be read against position. A 3% CTR at position two is bad and the same figure at position nine is good, so the diagnostic is the gap between a page’s actual rate and what is typical for where it sits. A page well below its expected rate has a title and description problem, not a ranking problem.
The levers are the title tag, the meta description, and whatever structured data makes the listing physically larger. All three are cheap to change and the feedback arrives in days rather than months.