What is a Good Click-Through Rate, and Is It Important for Your Campaigns?

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You definitely saw this ‘CTR’ abbreviation when checking your media buying campaign stats. Known as click-through rate, this metric seems obvious: it shows how clickable your Push, In-Page Push, or Interstitial ad is.

Another obvious take is that the more clicks you get, the more users see your offer and might convert.

But what should be considered a good click-through rate, and why do media buyers want to keep it as high as possible?

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What is CTR in Marketing?

A click-through rate, or CTR, is the percentage of users who clicked your ad out of all the users who watched it. 

Click-Through Rate Formula

So, the click-through rate shows how much your ad attracts users  — e.g., how clickable your creative is.

CTR is applied exclusively to formats where users must click the ad to see the offer. Speaking about PropellerAds formats, they are Push Ads, In-Page Push ads, and Interstitials ads.

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Why is Click-Through Rate Important?

The more users click your Push ads or Interstitials, the more visible your offer is — the more chances you will receive conversions, provided your landing page is converting enough. However, that’s not the only point. 

An even more important concept behind the click-through rate is that the bigger your CTR is, the more traffic you receive.

To explain it, let’s begin with two facts:

1. 1. Any traffic source (an ad network, social media network, etc.) wants to monetize every ad impression. When a media buyer wants to work with a Cost-Per-Click model and pays exclusively for clicks, a traffic source doesn’t receive any payments for impressions that did not turn into clicks.

2. 2. If a traffic source, be it Meta or PropellerAds, shows plenty of ads that nobody interacts with, this might mean the source’s space is full of irrelevant banners, push notifications, interstitial ads, or whatever else. Why show them at all, then?

Now, look at this simple picture:

1. 1. We have two ads — let them be Interstitials. (it doesn’t matter, in fact — it might be anything from a Facebook banner to a PropellerAds In-Page Push).

1. 2. For both ads, a media buyer set a CPС bid of $0,01. And we suppose that both ads collected 1,000 impressions.

1. 3. Ad 1 has a CTR of 1%. It means that ten users of 1000 will click Ad 1, and a traffic source will earn $0,1.

1. 4. Meanwhile, Ad 2, with a CTR of 10%, a traffic source, will earn $1 — because its CTR means we get 100 clicks out of the same 1000 impressions.

So, Ad 2, with a ten times higher CTR, is more profitable for a traffic source. But why should a media buyer even care about how much a network earns?

The answer is effective CPM, also known as eCPM. 

eCPM is a real bid you pay for impressions on a programmatic auction — and this value is very important when you compete with the other campaigns. In the Cost-Per-Click model, eCPM equals your CPC multiplied by your CTR.

The higher your eCPM is, the more traffic you receive for your campaigns. Therefore, with a high enough CTR, you can keep your CPC bid low but still receive good amounts of traffic.

If a traffic source shows users Ad2, it will monetize more impressions — even with a lower bid. Pretty logically, it will send more traffic to this banner, right?

Serge, media buyer: In very simple words, an advertisement is a unit of a user’s attention, measured in impressions. If you show a boring ad, you spend an impression but don’t earn money. Moreover, any traffic source wants to keep its user experience at the highest levels, which implies all ads must be relevant and interesting to users. This relevance and interestingness is exactly what CTR shows.

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What Is A Good CTR?

The truth is that there is no specific absolute value. Nobody can say that a 1% CTR is bad and a 5% CTR is good because it depends on the traffic source, GEO, format, and vertical — and creative, of course.

For example, a solar panel banner will most likely be less clickable than a push notification with a new iPhone giveaway.

So, your CTR can be called good if your campaign brings you enough traffic and conversions.

A tip from PropellerAds: when estimating your CTR, you need to compare it with your own results — not some benchmarks. Media buying is always about testing — so we recommend trying 4-6 different creatives per campaign. Then, when you find a creative with the highest CTR and conversion rates, you can count the CTR value of this creative as ‘good.’ That’s it!

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Are There Any CTR Benchmarks?

As we already mentioned, not really. However, we also mentioned that CTRs vary depending on traffic sources, formats, GEOs, and verticals. 

It means we can give some approximate numbers in the context of PropellerAds — and yeah, we’ll do it right away.

iGaming Average CTR (%)

	Push	In-Page Push	Interstitials
Brazil	0,143	0,183	4,219
Zambia	0,119	2,751	2,751
Philippines	1,5	2,654	2,269
Kenya	0,177	3,173	1,754
Nigeria	0,116	4,279	1,933
Canada	0,132	0,941	2,076

Finance Average CTR (%)

	Push	In-Page Push	Interstitials
India	0,203	2,056	5,732
Brazil	0,092	3,269	2,955
Malaysia	0,075	1,665	3,597
Mexico	0,111	2,267	1,754
Philippines	0,211	1,95	1,933
USA	0,1	1,44	3,351
Japan	0,33	0,5	2,217

Utilities Average CTR (%)

	Push	In-Page Push	Interstitials
USA	1,239	2,745	7,562
Mexico	0,261	3,354	5,381
Pakistan	0,938	2,293	7,618
India	1,247	2,267	8,891
Nigeria	0,923	11,469	8,485

Giveaways Average CTR (%)

	Push	In-Page Push	Interstitials
Pakistan	0,192	4,479	2,383
Iraq	0,281	2,986	3,979
Indonesia	0,526	1,888	7,60
Mexico	0,134	1,685	3,016
India	0,291	2,818	7,634

Social Average CTR (%)

	Push	In-Page Push	Interstitials
Korea	0,035	1,208	1,249
South Africa	0,168	1,295	1,892
UAE	0,21	2,973	4,532
Brazil	0,779	3,194	1,724

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How to Boost a CTR?

To answer this question, you just need to understand what makes a user click your ad. In short, there are three factors:

• Can the image break through the banner blindness?
• Is the text on your creative persuasive enough?
• Did the ad reach the right person?

See, it’s simply about your creative and targeting settings: both factors matter. If you show the catchiest push notification about loans in India, they won’t work out if you show them to people in the USA.

And what does PropellerAds have to offer when it comes to creatives and targeting?

1. 1. Targeting by GEO, device, OS, browser, zones, subzones, and connection type. 

1. 2. Targeting by audiences — your own or PropellerAds ready-made audiences by age, gender, and interests.

1. 3. Special CTR-boosters for creatives: 6 Interstitial templates, Badges, and customizable buttons for Push Notifications. Here is how a Push Notification looks with a badge and custom text instead of a simple ‘OK’ button:

4. 4. High-quality images. If you are advertising some product, make sure to show it in your creative. Images with people work better when they have a plain background and when a person in the photo is looking straight into the camera.

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To Sum Up

As Serge, a media buyer, says,

CTR should be not your goal, but your means to reaching bigger traffic volumes.

Makes sense! And we wish you to stay in green — whatever CTRs your statistics show.

What’s your average CTR? Discuss it on our Telegram chat