Paid click-through rate
also called Ad CTR
Definition
The share of ad impressions that produced a click.
How it's calculated
Paid clicks divided by paid impressions, multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal place, with a null guard on the denominator and nulls read as zero: `nvl(ROUND(100.0 * clicks / NULLIF(impressions, 0), 1), 0)`.
- Numerator
- Paid clicks over the period
- Denominator
- Paid impressions over the period
Scope, grain and dimensions
- Grain
- One number per date range, or one row per group_by value.
- Dimensions
- keyword · campaign_keyword · page · adgroup_name · campaign_name · campaign_type · intent · category · country · device
- Required filters
- date_range
- Aggregation
- A ratio of two sums, recomputed at the queried grain. Averaging per-campaign rates does not reproduce the account rate.
- Metric type
- rate · percent (0 to 100)
Data sources
Where you'll see this
Named reports that normally include this metric.
Paid search performance report
Skills and analyses that use it
Skills carry the judgment; the analysis verbs do the reading.
Skills
Analysis verbs
paid_search_overview
Method rungs and levers
A rung tells you what a movement here can and cannot explain, read the rungs below it first.
levers L8 Paid/organic interplay
Ask Quattr
- "What is our paid CTR by campaign?" Simulate this →
- "Are our ad creatives earning clicks?" Simulate this →
How to read it
How well the ad earns the click it was shown for. It is stored on a 0 to 100 scale and rounded to one decimal place, so very small rates flatten, read low-volume rows from the underlying click and impression counts instead.
Caveats, freshness and failure modes
Stored already as a percent, not as a fraction; a consumer that multiplies by 100 again will report a rate a hundred times too high.
Rounded to one decimal place in the semantic layer, so sub-0.05% rates report as 0.0.
A null denominator resolves to 0 rather than to no-value, so a zero can mean either no clicks or no impressions.
Paid CTR and organic CTR are different surfaces and are not comparable as like for like.
- Freshness
- ~1 day behind, Ads reporting settles overnight; same-day spend is provisional.
Common failure modes
- Treating a rounded 0.0 as no clicks.
- Re-scaling an already-percent value.
Not the same as
The confusions that cause the most wrong decisions.
Paid click-through rate Search impression share Compare definitions →
CTR measures what happened after the ad was shown; impression share measures how often it was shown at all.
Related metrics and workflows
Metrics
Verification
A definition is the smallest part of this.
The measurement matters because something acts on it. Here is the rest of the showcase, in the order most people find useful.