What’s considered a good click through rate (CTR) on Google vs. Facebook?

Google Ads and Facebook advertising are two very different platforms, but when you’re advertising on both, it’s tempting to compare metrics to see which is performing better. Here’s a quick overview on why you should be very careful about comparing the two and what kind of results you should expect from each.

One of the metrics we like to track to gauge whether an ad is resonating with our audience is the click through rate (or CTR). This is essentially the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions (views) your ad receives. It’s a metric we’d want to see being improved over time.

Now, there are lots of things that can affect your CTR. For example, your industry, your audience, your product/service, your ad messaging, devices, locations targeted, etc. So, it’s important to look at benchmarks that are comparable to your industry and targeting.

But there’s a few key things you need to understand before assessing click through rate on each platform.

Google Ads and click through rate

The way Google measures CTR is simply the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions with a click being when someone clicks on your advert. In most cases this click will result in a visit to your website if you’re running search, display or shopping campaigns.

Google Ads’ average CTR across all industries is 1.91% according to?WordStream, but can be as high as 6% for some sectors such as online dating. That said, we’ve worked on accounts with a 10% average CTR, so don’t settle on 1.91% thinking that’s your benchmark; anything’s possible with a bit of fine tuning!

Search vs. display and click through rate

If you’re advertising on both the search and display network, you’ll notice a big difference in your CTR. Don’t worry, this is normal. We’d expect to see the CTR on search network campaigns considerably higher than on display campaigns. This is usually down to the fact that display campaigns are essentially banner ads that appear on other websites. They’re not linked to an active search for a product or service; they can be shown to your audience at any time whilst browsing the internet, so there’s a good chance they’ll get ignored.

Search campaigns, on the other hand, only appear when someone is actively searching for your product or service, so you know they’re already interested in what your ad is offering, increasing the chances of a click.

We’d always expect CTR on search campaigns to be above 1%, but that can often be difficult to achieve on a display campaign.

Facebook Ads and click through rate

According to?WordStream, the average CTR across all industries is 0.9%; considerably lower than Google Ads.

Why is this? Well, there’s a few reasons, but the nature of the platform and the targeting have a lot to do with it. Facebook isn’t a search engine; its job is to connect people and communities, so adverts are not what users are looking for. In fact, your advert is likely to be getting in the way of what they were doing on Facebook in the first place, so responses to ads can be poor compared to Google Ads.

Another key thing to be aware of with Facebook is its definition of a click. Whilst with Google, we can assume a click is a visit to a website (i.e. we’re paying for traffic), with Facebook we’re often paying for engagement on their platform instead, which isn’t always as valuable to us as the advertiser.

Facebook has 2 metrics to be aware of:?Link Clicks?and?Clicks (All). These are two very different metrics, not to be confused.

Here’s how?Facebook explain the difference:

Link clicks:

• Clicks on an image or a call-to-action button within an ad that uses the traffic objective
• Clicks on an URL link in the text description of an ad
• Clicks on ad formats that take someone?into?a full-screen experience, such as lead forms, Canvas and collection
• Clicks to websites and app stores directly?from?links in the ad on News Feed

Clicks (all):

• Link clicks
• Post likes, comments or shares
• Clicks to a Facebook Page or Instagram profile
• Clicks to expand a photo or video to full screen

How valuable these metrics are will depend on the campaign objective you’ve set, so bear this in mind when viewing your reports.

In summary

What click through rate should you expect from your Google and Facebook Ad campaigns? The answer is always going to be “it depends”, but hopefully you’re now clearer on some of the benchmarks to use and how to understand how each platform reports (and defines) clicks.

The important thing to remember, is that a higher click through rate, is generally a good sign, whereas a declining click through rate can indicate issues with your ads, targeting or (especially on Facebook) ad fatigue (when people see too much of your ads).

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