Click-through rate
Definition
The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on it. Shortened to CTR. It shows whether your ad makes people curious enough to look.
Aron VeraartUpdated Click-through rate, or CTR, is the simplest test of whether your ad works at the top: out of everyone who saw it, how many clicked. A low CTR means the ad isn't stopping people, or it isn't speaking to the right people. A high CTR means you made them curious.
But CTR is not the goal, and that's where a lot of campaigns go wrong. You can get a great CTR with a vague or clickbaity ad, and then everybody drops off the moment they see the actual job. What you want is a decent CTR from the right people, followed by a good apply rate. So always read CTR together with what happens after the click.
One thing to watch: platforms count clicks differently. On Meta, "CTR (all)" includes every click on the ad, like opening the comments or the profile, while "link click-through rate" only counts clicks to your destination. For job ads, the link one is the one that matters.
How to calculate it
Divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions, then multiply by 100.
Example
A job title test runs the same ad with five different titles. The title with the highest CTR is a clever, vague one, but almost nobody who clicks it applies. The plain, searchable title has a slightly lower CTR and many more finished applications. That's the winner. (If you want to run this yourself, see how to test 5 job titles.)