What Are Good Click-Through Rates for Online Advertising?

With the increase in online advertising, one of the things our clients frequently want to know is how to measure the effectiveness of their online ads. While there are a number of good measures, the simplest and most commonly used benchmark remains ad click-through rate (CTR).

So What’s a Good Click-Through Rate?

Since this is the next, and most obvious, question, we’re always ready with some answers. The first answer is that a good CTR is heavily dependent on a number of factors. Assuming most factors are generally equal, though, we can provide the following insight on targeted CTR for some of the most common online advertising options.

Search Ads

Location: Search Engines (Google, Bing, etc.) 

Media Type: Text

Primary Target: B2C

Good CTR: 3% to 6% 

Display Ads

Location: Display Networks (e.g. Google) or any website 

Media Type: Image

Primary Target: B2C

Good CTR: 1% to 4% 

Facebook Ads

Location: Facebook 

Media Type: Image and Text

Primary Target: B2C

Good CTR: .1% to 1.5% 

Twitter Ads

Location: Twitter

Media Type: Text (promoted Tweets)

Primary Target: B2C

Good CTR: 2% to 4% 

LinkedIn Ads

Location: LinkedIn

Media Type: Image and Text

Primary Target: B2B

Good CTR: .03% to .1% 

Improving Your Advertising CTR

Here are a few factors that can have a significant impact on your advertising CTR.

• Ad Targeting
• Ad Copy and Keywords
• Ad Creative
• Type of Offer
• Industry Competition
• B2B vs. B2C Audience

With that said, there are a number of additional factors that can affect your CTR and describing them in detail is probably a good topic for another article.