CTR
What it means
CTR is the share of your Amazon ad impressions that produced a click, written as a percentage. It counts clicks on the ad, never sales — a click only opens the listing. Impressions include every time the ad rendered, so the same shopper scrolling past twice adds two.
The Google Ads tab on this page carries the same name and the same arithmetic, and the two numbers cannot be compared. A healthy Amazon CTR is 0.5%; a healthy Google Ads CTR is 5%. The denominators are different pools, so put each one only against its own history.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Clicks are taps that opened your listing from the ad.
ImpressionsImpressionsthe same shopper counts again every time they see it. Only worth watching next to clicks. is every time the ad was shown, repeat views included. It's the number you buy; the click is the number you earn.
Worked example. A campaign takes 400,000 impressions and 1,600 clicks. CTR = 1,600 ÷ 400,000 = 0.4%. At €0.50 a click that's €800 of spend for those 1,600 listing visits.
Lift the rate to 0.6% and the same 400,000 impressions return 2,400 clicks — 800 extra visits for no extra impressions. That's why the image and price shown in the results grid are usually cheaper to fix than the bid.
It answers the question
Of the shoppers who saw your ad in a results grid, how many opened the listing? It separates being shown from being chosen, which bids alone can't tell you.
Why it matters
Impressions are bought and clicks are earned. Your bid and your rank decide how often the ad appears; the main image, the title and the price decide whether anyone acts on it. CTR is the only number on the page that isolates that second half.
It also sits upstream of the money. Clicks are what you pay for, so CTR sets how much traffic a given pile of impressions converts into — and ACOSACOSabove that, those sales lose money.Under 20% is healthy then judges whether that traffic paid for itself.
What good looks like
This band is for Amazon only. The app grades Google Ads CTR ten times higher — 5% excellent, under 2% poor — because a Google Ads impression is your ad shown against a search someone typed, while an Amazon impression is your ad competing for a glance in a results grid. Reading one band against the other will tell you to fix something that isn't broken.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Add negative keywords | Pull the search-term report and block terms that take impressions and clicks but never sell | CTR up as the weak impressions leave the denominator | 1 week | Impressions fall, so total clicks usually fall with them. Block too broadly and you lose terms that convert slowly but profitably. |
| Fast Replace the main image | Test a clearer main image on the product the campaign points at | CTR moves within days on the same impressions | 1–2 weeks | It changes the listing for organic shoppers too, so you can't read the effect on ads alone. A busier image can lift clicks and lower conversion. |
| Fast Tighten the match types | Move spend from automatic and broad targeting into the exact terms that already sell | CTR up, spend concentrated | 1–2 weeks | You stop discovering new search terms. The rate improves partly because you shrank the pool, not because the ad got better. |
| Slow Fix price and reviews before the bid | Close the price gap with the competing listings and build up the rating shown in the grid | Same impressions earn more clicks | 1 quarter | Cutting price takes it straight out of margin, and reviews arrive on their own schedule — neither shows up in the week you decide to do it. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
CTR says the ad was chosen. Whether it was chosen by the right shopper is a different number entirely.
The ad found its shopper
More people clicked and the clicks converted at a better price. This is what a creative or targeting fix looks like when it lands.
Clicks that don't buy
The ad got more interesting to the wrong people. A hook that widens appeal does this — you buy more visits and the same number of orders.
Fewer clicks, better clicks
Usually what negative keywords look like the week after you add them. The rate fell because you removed impressions that were never going to convert.
Losing at both ends
Fewer clicks and each sale costs more. Something outside the ad usually explains this — price, stock, or a competitor arriving on your terms.
Impressions are the denominator, so the two move against each other by construction. Impressions up with CTR down almost always means looser matching rather than a worse ad — you added weaker placements to the pool. Impressions flat with CTR down is the real creative signal.
One measures the ad, the other measures the listing. Clicks rising while attributed sales sit still puts the problem on the page the click lands on — price, images, reviews or stock — not on the ad that earned it.
Common misreads
Both divide clicks by impressions, but they're dividing by different pools. That's exactly why the app grades Amazon at 0.5% and Google Ads at 5%. Compare each to its own band, never to the other.
Automatic targeting adds impressions from searches you never chose. The denominator grew and the ad never changed. Read the rate on the exact-match campaigns before you rewrite anything.
A click is a cost, not a sale. A high rate with a high ACOS means you're paying more people to look at a listing that isn't closing them.
Also called
Click-through rate · click rate · click-thru rate
See yoursYour CTR by campaign and by product, next to clicks, impressions and ACOS.
Open Amazon Ads →CTR
What it means
CTR is the share of your Google Ads impressions that produced a click, written as a percentage. An impression here is your ad shown against a search someone typed, so the rate reads as a match between your ad and what that person meant. The app's own guidance puts it that way: a higher rate means the ad and the query line up.
The arithmetic is identical to the Amazon tab — clicks divided by impressions — and the results are still not comparable. Google Ads is graded ten times higher because a typed search is a far narrower pool than a marketplace results grid.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Clicks are visits to your site from the ad.
ImpressionsImpressionsthe same shopper counts again every time they see it. Only worth watching next to clicks. is every time your ad was served against a search. You only enter that auction for queries your keywords and match types let you in for, which is why match type moves this number more than ad copy does.
Worked example. A campaign is served 60,000 times and earns 2,400 clicks. CTR = 2,400 ÷ 60,000 = 4%. At €2,400 of spend that's an Avg. CPCAvg. CPCSet by auction competition as much as by your bids. A rise pushes your cost per sale up even if the same share of visitors buys of €1.00.
Lift the rate to 6% and the same 60,000 impressions return 3,600 clicks — 1,200 more visits from the same auctions you were already winning.
It answers the question
When your ad appeared for a search, how often did it look like the answer? A low rate means you're entering auctions for searches your ad doesn't speak to.
Why it matters
On search you're not competing for attention, you're competing to be the right answer. Someone has already told Google what they want. CTR is the cleanest read on whether the keyword you bought and the ad you wrote actually match that.
It's also where the wrong kind of growth shows up first. Widening match types buys more impressions, and the rate falls before Cost/Conv.Cost/Conv.Counts only what Google's own tracking sees as a conversion, which may not match your orders. Set it against what a customer is worth to you does — so CTR gives you a week or two of warning that the extra reach isn't the reach you wanted.
What good looks like
The app grades Google Ads CTR on its own scale: 5% or more is strong, and under 2% needs work. Between the two, the ad copy and keyword focus have room to sharpen.
That band sits ten times above the Amazon tab's 0.5%, and the gap is the whole point. A Google Ads impression is a person typing a query you chose to bid on; an Amazon impression is a tile in a results grid someone is scrolling past. Same formula, different pools, so the two bands measure different things and neither one travels.
Read the rate at the ad-group level rather than the account level. Tightly themed groups sit far above loose ones, and a single broad group can drag an otherwise healthy account average down.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Add negative keywords | Pull the search-term report and block the queries that take impressions but never click | CTR up as those impressions leave the denominator | 1 week | Search IS falls with the impressions, and blocking too broadly cuts off the terms you'd have discovered next quarter. |
| Fast Tighten the match types | Move your spending keywords from broad to phrase or exact | CTR up, impressions down | 1–2 weeks | You stop finding new queries, and total conversions often fall even as every rate on the page improves. |
| Slow Write the ad against the query | Put the actual search wording into the headlines of the groups that spend most | Same auctions earn more clicks | 3–6 weeks | New copy resets that ad's performance history, so the next fortnight reads noisy. Copy written to widen appeal can lift clicks and push Cost/Conv. up with them. |
| Slow Split the big terms into their own groups | Give your highest-volume keywords a group and an ad of their own | CTR up across the split terms | 1 quarter | More groups to maintain, and thin ones take much longer to gather enough data to judge. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
CTR tells you the ad matched the search. It says nothing about how many searches you were eligible for in the first place.
Search IS is the share of eligible searches you actually showed for, so it's the other half of the story. Both rising means you're in more auctions and landing in them — the combination worth funding. CTR rising while Search IS falls means the rate improved because you're showing for fewer searches, which is real if you cut deliberately and misleading if the budget ran out mid-day. CTR falling while Search IS rises is the broad-match signature: more impressions, thinner intent.
Read together they tell you whether traffic is getting cheaper or just scarcer. CTR up with Avg. CPC flat means the same auctions now send more visits for the same money. CTR up with Avg. CPC climbing means you bought position rather than earning relevance.
Google Ads carries its own return figure under a different name — Conv. Val / Cost, not ROAS. CTR is the top of that chain and the return is the bottom. A rising click rate with a falling return means the new clicks are cheaper to get and worth less when they arrive.
Common misreads
It isn't. The summary row sums clicks and impressions across every campaign and then divides once, so a single high-volume campaign sets most of it. A small campaign at 12% barely moves a total built on a large one at 3%.
The ads didn't change — the denominator did. Broad match enters you into searches you never picked. Judge the copy on the exact-match groups, where the query pool held still.
A high rate means the ad matched the search, not that the click paid. Check Cost/Conv. and Conv. Val / Cost first — a term can be a perfect match for a query that never buys.
Also called
Click-through rate · click rate · click-thru rate
See yoursYour CTR by campaign, ad group and search term, next to clicks, impressions and Search IS.
Open Google Ads →CTR
What it means
On the TikTok Ads tab, CTR is the share of your TikTok ad impressions that produced a click, written as a percentage. It counts clicks on the ad, never sales — a click only sends someone to your site. Impressions include every time the ad was shown, repeat views included.
Each tab on this page divides clicks by impressions, but the pools are different — a scroll-past impression in a TikTok feed is not the same event as an Amazon results-grid impression or a Google search impression. Put this number only against its own history, never against another tab.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Clicks are taps that left TikTok for your site.
ImpressionsImpressionsthe same shopper counts again every time they see it. Only worth watching next to clicks. is every time the ad played, repeat views included. It's the number you buy; the click is the number you earn.
Worked example. A campaign takes 500,000 impressions and 5,000 clicks. CTR = 5,000 ÷ 500,000 = 1.0%.
Lift the rate to 1.2% and the same impressions return 6,000 clicks — 1,000 extra visits for no extra reach. On a feed platform the hook in the first second usually moves this more than the targeting does.
It answers the question
Of the people the ad reached in the feed, how many tapped through? It separates being shown from being chosen, which spend alone can't tell you.
Why it matters
Impressions are bought and clicks are earned. Budget and the auction decide how often the ad plays; the creative decides whether anyone acts on it. CTR is the number that isolates that second half, and on a scroll feed it moves fastest of all — a hook either lands in the first second or it doesn't.
It also sits upstream of the money. Clicks are what you pay for through CPCCPCcheck both together., so a rising CTR is usually the first sign a new creative is working, days before it shows in the return.
What good looks like
There's no published band for TikTok CTR in the app, and no cross-platform number to borrow — a healthy feed click rate is nothing like a search one. Judge it against your own recent campaigns and against the creative behind it. A rate that jumps when you ship a new hook and decays as that hook tires is the normal shape; a flat, slowly falling rate on the same few ads is the signal to refresh.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Refresh the hook | New opening seconds on the top-spending ad, changing the idea rather than the caption | CTR moves within days on the same spend | 1 week | New creative restarts learning, so cost per click is unstable for a few days before the rate settles. |
| Fast Cut the tired creative | Turn off ads whose CTR has slid for two weeks while frequency climbed | Account CTR rises as fatigued ads leave the pool | 1 week | The average improves because you removed the weak rows, not because anything got better — watch total clicks hold. |
| Slow Build a creative pipeline | Enough native, sound-on concepts each month that the account never leans on one hook | CTR holds instead of decaying between refreshes | 1 quarter | Production time and money that lands nowhere in this line, and most concepts won't beat the control. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A click rate says the ad was tapped. What that traffic then cost and did is the next number along.
A rising CTR usually pulls CPC down — more clicks from the same impressions means you pay less for each. When CTR rises but CPC doesn't fall, the auction got dearer at the same time, and the two effects are cancelling out.
Impressions are the denominator, so the two move against each other by construction. Impressions up with CTR down usually means the audience widened, not that the ad got worse; impressions flat with CTR down is the real creative signal.
Common misreads
Both divide clicks by impressions, but a feed impression and a results-grid impression are different events. The tabs aren't comparable — read each against its own history.
A click is a cost, not a sale. A high CTR with a poor return means you're paying for taps from people who don't buy — read it beside CPC and the sales it led to.
On a feed the creative tires before the audience does. A slide on the same few ads is usually fatigue — refresh the hook before you rebuild the targeting.
Also called
Click-through rate · click rate · click-thru rate
See yoursYour TikTok Ads CTR over the period, next to CPC, clicks and impressions.
Open Marketing →CTR
What it means
On the AppLovin tab, CTR is the share of your AppLovin ad impressions that produced a click, written as a percentage. It counts clicks on the ad, never sales. Impressions include every time the ad was shown, repeat views included.
Each tab on this page divides clicks by impressions, but the pools aren't the same event, so the numbers can't be compared across tabs. One thing to keep in mind on this tab: AppLovin counts by UTC day while your Shopify sales use the store's time zone, so at the edge of a short date range the click and the order it led to can fall on different days.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Clicks are taps that left the ad for your site.
ImpressionsImpressionsthe same shopper counts again every time they see it. Only worth watching next to clicks. is every time the ad was shown, repeat views included. It's the number you buy; the click is the number you earn.
Worked example. A campaign takes 400,000 impressions and 3,200 clicks. CTR = 3,200 ÷ 400,000 = 0.8%.
Lift the rate to 1.0% and the same impressions return 4,000 clicks — 800 extra visits for no extra reach. The creative shown in-app usually moves this more than the bid does.
It answers the question
Of the people the ad reached, how many tapped through? It separates being shown from being chosen, which spend alone can't tell you.
Why it matters
Impressions are bought and clicks are earned. Budget and the auction decide how often the ad shows; the creative decides whether anyone acts on it. CTR is the number that isolates that second half.
It also sits upstream of the money. Clicks are what you pay for through CPCCPCcheck both together., so a rising CTR is usually the first sign a creative is working before it shows in the return.
What good looks like
There's no published band for AppLovin CTR in the app, and no cross-platform number to borrow. Judge it against your own recent campaigns and the creative behind it. A rate that lifts with a fresh creative and eases as it tires is the normal shape; a flat, slowly falling rate on the same ads is the signal to refresh.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Refresh the creative | New concepts on the top-spending ad, changing the idea rather than the caption | CTR moves within days on the same spend | 1 week | New creative restarts learning, so cost per click is unstable for a few days before the rate settles. |
| Fast Cut the tired ads | Turn off ads whose CTR has slid for two weeks running | Account CTR rises as weak ads leave the pool | 1 week | The average improves because you removed the weak rows, not because anything got better — watch total clicks hold. |
| Slow Build a creative pipeline | Enough new concepts each month that the account never leans on one ad | CTR holds instead of decaying between refreshes | 1 quarter | Production time and money that lands nowhere in this line, and most concepts won't beat the control. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A click rate says the ad was tapped. What that traffic then cost and did is the next number along.
A rising CTR usually pulls CPC down — more clicks from the same impressions means you pay less for each. When CTR rises but CPC doesn't fall, the auction got dearer at the same time, and the two effects are cancelling out.
Impressions are the denominator, so the two move against each other by construction. Impressions up with CTR down usually means the audience widened, not that the ad got worse; impressions flat with CTR down is the real creative signal.
Common misreads
Both divide clicks by impressions, but the impression pools are different events. The tabs aren't comparable — read each against its own history.
AppLovin counts by UTC day and your Shopify sales by the store's time zone, so at the edge of a short range they can sit a day apart. Widen the range or compare whole months.
A click is a cost, not a sale. A high CTR with a poor return means you're paying for taps from people who don't buy — read it beside CPC and the sales it led to.
Also called
Click-through rate · click rate · click-thru rate
See yoursYour AppLovin CTR over the period, next to CPC, clicks and impressions.
Open Marketing →