Facebook has one of the largest social media ad networks in the world with over 2 million advertisers & billions of users. That means you’re going up against several of these different advertisers just to get your ad to show up in your prospect’s Facebook feed. So when your ads do show up, you should try to get as many relevant clicks as possible.

This article will go over how Facebook defines CTR, what a good CTR is, and tips on how to get a great CTR on Facebook.

CTR (click-through rate) measures how many times a user clicked on your ad once it has been shown to them on Facebook’s ad network. (clicks divided by impressions).

It’s a commonly used lead metric to help marketers understand how engaging ads were for the audience they are targeting. Now let’s break this down a bit because there are some important details that can determine whether or not you’re getting a decent CTR.

Facebook CTR Definition

Depending upon what you want to achieve, there are different ways to calculate your CTR:

All CTR: if you want to know how many people clicked on your ad, including post engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares) along with clicks to your site (link clicks), you could look at the All CTR to determine ad engagement (all clicks / impressions)

Link Click CTR: if your goal is to get people to your website to make a purchase or sign up for an offer, then looking solely at link clicks is a better measure of success (link clicks / impressions). Your CTR will naturally be lower because you’re including fewer clicks, but they’re higher quality because these people reached your website.

Unique CTR: if you want to exclude people that clicked on your ad multiple times to see how many unique users clicked on your ad. This metric is a higher quality version of Link Click CTR because it excludes duplicate clicks & duplicate impressions, though it can miss out on your highly engaged users that are looking for additional information. This metric is calculated by taking Facebook’s unique link click metric divided by reach.

Landing Page View CTR: though it’s not in Facebook’s ad platform, it’s sometimes useful to look at your CTR by just using landing page views. That way, you can see how many people clicked on your ad AND stayed on your site to get an idea of how many higher intent users saw your site content (Landing Page Views / Impressions).

You could use any one of these metrics, though it’s more important to know how each is used and be consistent with how you measure CTR to measure changes in performance.

What is a Good CTR on Facebook?

Wordstream has calculated the CTR benchmarks above by using its internal data. In the past, CTR varies a lot by industry, though what we have seen is that aiming for a 1% CTR tends to be a good rule of thumb.

The reality of CTR on Facebook is that it is highly dependent upon what campaign objective you’re optimizing towards, what audience(s) you are targeting, and of course, your ad copy.

Campaign objectives let Facebook know what you’re trying to achieve by running your ads. To the untrained eye, the choices seem almost as mundane as picking a dish off of a menu. The reality is that your campaign objective determines what Facebook tries to optimize your campaign for.

If you choose to optimize for traffic, Facebook will try to get you as many clicks as possible within your budget. As you might guess, optimizing for clicks will get your more clicks vs any other objective which can improve your CTR. That’s great if you just want a great CTR, but not so great if you also want more purchases or more leads. Awareness & Engagement campaigns are good at getting a good CTR as well because they optimize for reach and post engagement respectively.

The point is that the campaign objective of your campaign will increase or decrease your CTR which you should keep in mind if you want a better CTR or more purchases/leads. Sometimes having a lower CTR vs industry averages can get you a better CPA and more conversions because Facebook is getting more relevant users to click on your ads.

The audiences you target also make a big difference in how great your CTR is. People that you target from your customer lists or remarketing audiences will almost always be more likely to click more on your ads vs someone that doesn’t know anything about you. We recommend that you look at your account wide CTR and consider the difference between the CTR for your prospecting campaigns vs your remarketing campaigns because there will almost always be a big difference between the two unless you’re offering something for free that applies to nearly everyone or offer something with a short sales cycle.

Your ad copy has a big impact on your CTR as well of course. Though the best ad isn’t likely to perform very well without the right audience & campaign objective. You could have great bait, but if you’re fishing in a desert, you’re not going to get too many bites.

We give more details on how to improve your performance in our prior article. Here’s what you can do to improve your ad copy:

Know your target audience – how they talk about their pain points, what they care about, and the key benefits they’re looking for.

Your differentiators vs alternatives in the market – your ‘so what’ factor that gets people to choose you over the competition.

Test different ad variations for your text, headline, CTA button, and image to see what stands out. Make sure you record the results and then rinse and repeat.

Test contextually relevant creative relative to the audiences you’re targeting. Someone that knows about what you’re offering and is choosing between different options is likely going to want to see something different from someone that has never heard about you before.