Promotion School: what is CTR?

Together with Mobio, we tell you a little about CTR, one of the most important metrics in marketing. We touch upon such topics as its calculation and analysis of indicators. The author of the material is Nikolay Marchenko, the media buyer of the platform.

Nikolay MarchenkoWhat is CTR?

CTR – Cisk-Through Rate is an indicator of the clickability of advertising.

Calculated by the formula:

CTR = (number of clicks on the ad / number of impressions) * 100%.
A cornerstone from the world of marketing metrics.

An indicator that you should definitely focus on when analyzing advertising campaigns, because it can tell how interesting your advertising offer is to the audience.

How can I tell by CTR that the ad has entered?

Each advertising network has its own average CTR for each product category. Knowing it, you can already determine at an early stage whether it is worth continuing to pour traffic on your creative or it’s time to stop it.

If the average CTR of the network is 1%, then at 0.4% it is desirable to stop the test, and at 1.6% you can safely test further and even increase the advertising budget for an ad.

There are exceptions, but, as a rule, the higher the CTR, the cheaper the event is for you, for example, the cost of installing an application.

Case

There are two banners.

Banner #1 and banner #2
Banner #1 has a CTR of 0.6% with an installation cost of 300 rubles.

This happens because the image looks like an ordinary advertising photo and does not visually display the essence.

Creative #2 received a CTR of 1.2% because it carries more information for the user. You can immediately see the comparison of prices and benefits, and the illustration looks better than the photo.

The main rule of CTR

The more clicks on an ad, the faster and more traffic is bought. Advertising networks benefit from this, because they get more clicks and, consequently, more money due to volume. It is better to give the traffic “wholesale” and a lot to ads that will be quickly unscrewed than to give expensive and little to low-clickable ads.

The pitfall of CTR

High CTR is not always a good thing. Sometimes this may mean that the banner did not work well, but the site turned out to be unsuccessful.

We are talking about cases when CTR reaches astronomical indicators, a la 20-30%. Most likely, this means that ads are “clicked” on the site. The latter can mean two things. Either bots click on the advertisement, or people who find themselves in a situation where it is impossible not to click on the advertisement, for example, when a cross is depicted on the banner to close the advertisement, but in fact the user is still being transferred via the advertising link.

What can a high CTR mean if there are no downloads?

In this case, either we are talking about the scenario described above, or something is confusing the audience at the next stage. For example, the message diverges from the application page in the App Store or the game weighs a lot, it cannot be downloaded via a cellular network.

In other words, the problem is not in the approach to working with the banner, but in something completely different.

What can I do when the CTR is high, but there are no downloads?

We take a successful creative and start conducting A/B tests with various conditions. For example, in one case we leave only wi-fi, in the other we leave all types of Internet connection. Let the other settings be the same. Then we look at the result, from which we then start

Some other advertising networks allow you to view performance results broken down by targeting directly in the advertising cabinet, which also helps to quickly determine which users the ad “caught on”, and where it went badly and it can be disabled.

Game Developer’s Dictionary

See also: