# Click-through rate

> 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.

- Section: Advertising
- Author: Aron Veraart
- Source: https://aronv.com/glossary/click-through-rate

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](/tutorials/job-title-ab-test).)