Shimon Sandler wrote a post about CTR metric and how it can be used as an analytic metric. As I was commenting on his blog I decided to share it with you here as well.

My take on the CTR is … every industry is different. For some 2% is excellent and for some 2% is awful. I worked with keywords that on average would get around 12% CTR and if it fell to 4-6% that would be considered as poor performance.

When I look at the CTR I use it to calculate the popularity of a 2nd AD that I am testing at the moment and on the keyword relevance. Another reason to monitor your CTR is for Click Fraud.

If all of a sudden your CTR jumps from 3% to 13% and you have not done anything to the ad or the CPC this is a Click Fraud red flag. This means you have to go look at your log files and see if the traffic you’ve been paying for is legitimate.

Sometimes you can target a keyword that is not the keyword your customer might use, BUT the keyword is being used by your target market searching for something else at the moment. Even though your click through rate can be a lousy 1% there, it might still be a winner for you because those that do click are the ones who understand what you do by reading your CLEAR ad.

So you see … there is no decisive CTR analogy or study. The use of it should be for comparison, monitoring and indirect analysis.