Pick what you are solving for, then enter the two figures you already have.
Times the ad was served in feed.
Unique clicks, where your platform reports them.
Sets the benchmark your rate is compared against.
Adds cost per click and cost per 1,000.
Orders or signups from those clicks.
CTR tells you whether the subject line, the message and the creative earned attention. What happens after the click is a separate question, and the conversion rate calculator answers it.
The arithmetic above is exact. The benchmarks are estimates. Paid social ad CTRs are published as roughly 0.9% to 2% of impressions in US industry reporting as of August 2026, and they shift every year and vary widely by industry, list quality, country and account. Use them to sense-check a campaign and to guide planning decisions, not to reconcile a report.
See how Mage helps Shopify brands lift repeat purchase rate with loyalty, referrals and store credit.
Click-through rate is the share of people who clicked out of everyone the campaign reached. The formula is clicks divided by impressions, multiplied by 100. It measures whether your message earned attention, which is why it is the first number most marketers look at after a send.
Divide clicks by impressions, then multiply by 100 to turn the result into a percentage. A paid social ad served 25,000 times that collected 750 clicks works out at 750 divided by 25,000, which is 0.03, multiplied by 100 for a 3% CTR. An email delivered to 8,000 subscribers with 240 clicks is 240 divided by 8,000, so 3% as well.
An impression is one delivery of your message: an ad served in feed, an SMS delivered to a handset, or an email that reached the inbox. For email campaigns most teams use delivered rather than sent, because bounced sends never had a chance to be clicked. Choose one definition and stay with it, or your CTR will move for reasons that have nothing to do with the campaign.
No, and mixing them up is the most common reason two people report different CTRs for the same send. An impression is a delivery, an open is a subscriber actually viewing the message. Opens have also become unreliable since mail privacy protection started pre-loading images, so a CTR built on delivered impressions is the sturdier of the two.
Roughly 2% to 5% of delivered emails is the typical published range across retail and ecommerce. A promotional blast to a full list often sits nearer the bottom of that, while a triggered flow to recent buyers can clear it comfortably. Treat the range as a sense check rather than a target, since it varies sharply by industry and list age.
Click-to-open rate divides clicks by opens instead of by delivered emails, so it measures the message itself rather than the subject line. If 10,000 emails are delivered, 2,500 are opened and 300 are clicked, the CTR is 3% and the click-to-open rate is 12%. When your CTR drops, comparing the two tells you whether the subject line failed to earn the open or the content failed to earn the click.
Much higher than email, commonly 10% to 30% of delivered messages. SMS arrives in a channel people check within minutes, there is no inbox tab to hide in, and the message carries a single link rather than a page of competing ones. The flip side is cost per message, so a strong SMS CTR still needs a revenue figure behind it.
Roughly 0.9% to 2% is typical for paid social, because most impressions land on people who never asked to see you. Paid search runs higher, often 3% to 6%, since the person typed the query in the first place. Comparing an ad CTR against an email CTR is meaningless, which is why the calculator asks for the campaign type.
Divide your click target by the CTR expressed as a decimal. If you need 1,200 clicks and your campaigns run at 1.5%, that is 1,200 divided by 0.015, so 80,000 impressions. Switch the calculator to Find impressions and it does that step for you, then adds the cost of buying that reach if you enter a budget.
Because the message and the landing page are promising different things. A subject line offering 30% off that lands on a full price collection page will pull a strong CTR and then lose almost everyone. Check that the offer, the wording and the product on the page match the creative that earned the click, and check the page loads quickly on a phone.
Subject lines and preview text mostly control whether the message gets opened at all, so they set the ceiling on CTR. Inside the message, a single clear call to action beats several competing ones, and the first link usually takes the majority of clicks. For ads, creative does most of the work: changing the image or opening frame typically moves CTR further than rewriting the caption.
It is usually the largest single lift available. Sending to people who bought in the last 90 days, or to a specific loyalty tier, replaces a generic message with one that matches what the person actually cares about. Brands that split a broadcast into a few segments based on recent behaviour commonly see click rates well above their all-list average, because relevance is what earns the click.
Unique clicks, in almost every case. Total clicks counts the same person clicking three times as three clicks, which inflates the rate and can push it past 100% on a small send. Unique clicks answers the question you actually care about, which is how many people responded.
Yes. No signup, no email, and no limit on how many campaigns you run through it. It is built by Mage Loyalty, a loyalty, referrals and store credit app for Shopify.
Mage is a loyalty, referral and store credit app built for Shopify. Reward repeat purchases, run VIP tiers, and give customers a reason to come back, without writing a line of code.
