Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is the share of people who click a link after seeing it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions and expressed as a percentage; it measures how often a search result, ad, or email link earns the click rather than just the view.
CTR shows up wherever something is shown but not always acted on: organic search results, paid ads, and email campaigns each report their own version. In search, a result that ranks well but gets few clicks is signalling that its title and description do not match what people want, so CTR is often read as a relevance and presentation problem rather than a ranking one.
Rich snippets are one of the clearest levers. When a result carries a star rating, a price, or an FAQ pulled from structured data, it takes up more space and gives the searcher more reason to click, which tends to lift CTR even when the position does not change. The same listing can earn noticeably more clicks once review stars appear next to it.
The honest caveat is that CTR is easy to misread in isolation. A high rate on a tiny number of impressions is noise, position skews everything (rank one always out-clicks rank eight), and a clickbait title can win clicks while sending the wrong people to the page. Read CTR next to position and conversion rate, not on its own.