Click through rate

Click through rate is the number of times an advertisement is clicked devided by the number of views generated. 

Click through rate in online advertising

We use the click through rate to determine the success of an online advertising campaign. The click through rate can be calculated by dividing number of users who clicked on an add by the impressions ( number of times an add is displayed )  Then take this number and multiply it by 100 to get the percentile. For example if your banner or add was displayed 2000 times and 5 users clicked on this banner, your click through rate would come down to 5/2000 = 0.0025 *100 = 0.25% not a lot but click through rates for banners have shown to be very low.

Banner ad click through rates have fallen over time, often measuring significantly less than 1%. By selecting an appropriate advertising site with high affinity (e.g. a movie magazine for a movie advertisement), the same banner can achieve a substantially higher click-through rate.

Click through rate definition error

The click through rate is commonly defined as the number of clicks divided by the number of views and not the number of persons who clicked the add. This can lead to a huge error in actual click percentile when multiple persons click the same add 20 or more times. In the common definition clicking more then 1 would increase the click through rate which is faulty.

Click through rate in the search engine result page

The click through rate in the search engines is much the same as the click through rate in online advertising; this is because working witch search engines is online advertising. However the biggest difference is the click through rate in the search engine result pages is much higher than for advertisements. This is easily explained as the users is using the search engine as a tool to find what they are looking for and more importantly the trust the search engine results.