Pick where the clicks come from, add two numbers, and see your click-through rate, how it compares, and what to fix first. Works for email, ads, search and landing pages.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who saw something and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, times 100. What counts as good depends on where it happens. Email click rates of 1% to 3% are common, Google search ads often land between 3% and 6%, and Meta ads nearer 1%.
Who this is for: Coaches, consultants and founders checking whether their emails, ads or pages are getting clicked.
Click-through rate, or CTR, is clicks divided by impressions, multiplied by 100. If an ad was shown 2,000 times and clicked 50 times, the CTR is 50 ÷ 2,000 × 100 = 2.5%. In plain words, about 1 in every 40 people who saw it clicked.
The same maths works backwards. If you know two of the three numbers, you can find the third:
Email is slightly different. The "impressions" are emails delivered, not emails sent, because a bounced email was never seen. Email tools also show a second number, the click-to-open rate: unique clicks divided by unique opens. Click rate tells you how the whole send performed. Click-to-open tells you how good the email was once someone opened it. Open tracking is less reliable since Apple Mail Privacy Protection, so treat click-to-open as a guide, not gospel.
It depends heavily on where the click happens. A 2% CTR is weak for a landing page button and strong for a Meta ad. The ranges below are rough guides drawn from commonly cited industry averages. They move with your industry, your audience, the platform and the time of year, so use them as a sense check, not a target.
| Where | What is measured | Rough typical range |
|---|---|---|
| Email (click rate) | Unique clicks ÷ emails delivered | 1% to 3% |
| Email (click-to-open) | Unique clicks ÷ unique opens | 10% to 20% |
| Google Ads search | Clicks ÷ impressions | 2% to 6% |
| Meta ads | Link clicks ÷ impressions | 0.8% to 1.5% |
| Organic Google search | Clicks ÷ impressions, whole site | 1% to 5% |
| Landing page button | Button clicks ÷ visitors | 10% to 30% |
Two cautions. Organic CTR swings hugely with ranking position: the top result gets far more clicks than result eight, so a site-wide average hides a lot. And small numbers lie. Ten clicks from 200 impressions is 5%, but one more or one fewer click moves it a long way. Wait for a few thousand impressions before you judge.
A low email click rate almost always comes down to one of three things, and the click-to-open rate tells you which.
For context on the other half of the picture, see our guide to the average email open rate.
A low CTR on an ad usually means a mismatch. The ad talks about you instead of the problem the viewer has, the audience is wrong, or the offer is not strong enough to make someone stop. On search, it often means the ad does not echo the words people typed.
It matters for two reasons. You reach fewer people for the same money, and on most ad platforms a low CTR tends to push your cost per click up, because the platforms favour ads people engage with. But CTR is only the first step. We often see ads with a fine CTR and no sales, because the page, the follow-up or the offer leaks after the click. If that sounds familiar, our ROAS calculator shows whether the clicks are paying for themselves.
At Unbury we look at the whole path, from the first click to the sale, because a better CTR only helps if what happens next works too.
CTR is clicks divided by impressions, multiplied by 100. For example, 30 clicks from 1,500 impressions is 30 ÷ 1,500 × 100 = 2%. For email, use unique clicks divided by emails delivered.
Click rate is unique clicks divided by emails delivered, so it shows how the whole send performed. Click-to-open rate is unique clicks divided by unique opens, so it shows how well the email did once it was opened.
Not on its own. A high CTR means people want what you showed them, but if the page or offer does not deliver, you just pay for more clicks that do not buy. Judge CTR alongside conversions and return on ad spend.
Commonly cited averages for Google search ads sit somewhere around 3% to 6%, and they vary a lot by industry. Under about 2% usually means the ad does not match what people searched for.
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