Shopping KPI Survey: CTR— What is your average clickthrough rate?

The Search Monitor recently conducted a survey to aggregate performance metrics for shopping campaigns on Google, Bing and Amazon.

Shopping engines don’t publish any directional stats, and few research papers have been published on this topic. Therefore, benchmarking and goal setting for shopping campaigns is challenging. That’s why we took on the task of anonymously aggregating the top most requested KPI’s, including CTR, Conversion Rate, and ROAS for advertisers running shopping campaigns on Google, Amazon and Bing.

Question

What is your average clickthrough rate?

About the stat: CTR (click-through rate) is the ratio of clicks on an ad to the total number of ad impressions. Calculated as clicks / impressions.

Highlights

Looking at these results, most advertisers are seeing an average CTR of 1.5% or lower, while just over 20% see an average CTR over 2.5%.

As in any ad campaign, click-through rate (CTR) is an important benchmark to track.

A high CTR is a good indication that users find your product listings helpful and relevant. CTR is also a factor in determining ad rank. A strong CTR is relative to what you’re advertising and on which networks.

You can use CTR to gauge which ads, listings, and keywords are successful for you and where you have room for improvement.

Visual appeal also matters when it comes to CTR, as do keywords, and how your keywords, ads, and listings relate to each other and to your business. The more those things work together, the more likely a user is to click on your ad or listing after searching on your keyword phrase.

It is important to benchmark CTR—and other metrics— for your industry. This is because you want to know how you stack up against industry competitors, not all advertisers.
For example, industries that traditionally value functionality over visual design, often have the poorest CTRs in their shopping ads. So if you sell office supplies, you don’t want to compare your CTR to a luxury automobile advertiser.

A final note: CTRs for shopping ads are a unique format and have their own benchmarks, But to give context, the average CTR in AdWords is 1.91% for search and 0.35% for display (source: Larry Kim via Wordstream)

Download the Report