What is CTR (Click-Through Rate)?

CTR (click-through rate) is the percentage of people who clicked your ad after seeing it. It is the fastest read on whether your creative and hook earn attention.

Formula: CTR = (Clicks / Impressions) x 100

Why it matters

Platforms serve ads to thousands of people and count how many tap through; CTR compresses that into one comparable number per ad. Because it moves quickly and needs little spend to stabilize, it is usually the first signal media buyers use to separate promising creatives from dead ones. A strong CTR also tends to lower delivery costs, since platforms reward ads people engage with.

Reading the signals

• Good: CTR clearly above your own account average for that placement and product
• Bad: high CTR but weak conversion rate — the ad over-promises or attracts the wrong clicker
• Bad: CTR decaying week over week on the same audience — creative fatigue setting in

What to do about it

CTR is decided almost entirely in the first seconds of the creative, so the way to raise it is testing many hooks and openings, not tweaking bids. Generating a batch of UGC-style variations inside Claude with Polaris lets you put ten different openings into the auction and let CTR pick the winner. See the full ecommerce ads glossary, or put it into practice with the Polaris AI UGC ad generator.