I just made a post on What is good eCPM and felt to write a similar post about what is good CTR as they both go hand in hand.

CTR stands for Click Through Rate and it the ratio of number of clicks on the ads divided by number of times ads were served multiplied by 100 (as CTR is represented in percentage)

So say your ad was served 100 times (viewed 100 times) and 3 people click on it, the CTR will be 3%. If it got shown 200 times and 5 people clicked on it, your CTR is 2.5%. CTR is a measure to find and compare websites and how many people are really clicking ads. It an important measure as a site with double the CTR of other site with half the traffic makes equal amount in adsense earnings (or any other program as a matter of fact).

What is Good CTR ?

This is a trick question since CTR depends on niche, ad placement and the kind of ads being served. Niches like celebrity, wallpaper, gaming are often reported to have less CTR where as sites which offer very focused content and which have very directed related ads (say mortgage ad on mortgage website) are often gets high CTR.

Roughly industry standard is 3 clicks per 100 views, so 3% CTR is good. Anything below it means you need to work on it. Though many people makes loads of money even with as low CTR as 0.5% because of huge traffic. CTR with 5+% is considered very good and anything above 10% is just awesome. Though do note that very high CTR often cause adsense flags to raise for click frauds.

If you have low CTR, you can always try to change the ad locations and ad formats to get higher CTR.

Related posts:

1. What is Adsense Smart Pricing ? Being a user of adsense for over 4 years now,...
2. Should you use Adsense Competitive Ad Filter ? In case you are not aware, google adsense offers Competitive...
3. Adsense Tricks I have covered adsense related content many times in the...
4. How to avoid Adsense Smart Pricing ? In the previous article, I had covered what is smart...
5. Why Adsense ads are served from doubleclick instead of Google Today Google adsense cleared the doubt many were wondering about...