What is Click Through Rate (CTR)?

CTR is simply the percentage of people who are shown your ad, then click it. So if there have been 100 Impressions and 12 Clicks, that's a 12% CTR.

It's an indication of how relevant your ad text is to your keywords, and of how persuasive your ad has been at getting people to click. However, from August 2024 CTR has dropped massively across the Ad Grant program as a whole and it's no longer the reliable metric it once was.

The 5% CTR rule is no longer enforced in Ad Grants

The old compliance rule was that if the account-wide CTR falls below 5% in any two consecutive months, your Ad Grant account might get temporarily suspended.

Performance Max campaigns are officially exempt from the rule. However, since five years ago the rule is no longer enforced even for Search campaigns. You can safely ignore it.

Please ignore anyone who tells you that you need to keep CTR high or lose your account: won't happen. A lot of agencies use this to try to scare you into hiring them to fix a non-problem.

How to figure out your account-wide CTR

1. Navigate to Campaigns > Overview.
2. Ensure that the filters for Campaign status and Ad group status are both set to All.
3. Use the drop-down in any of the four stats boxes to select CTR.
4. Select a date range of 90 days.
5. You can use the three dot vertical menu to group data by month.
   

What can cause a low CTR?

Generic and off-mission keywords

If you use very generic and off-mission keywords, or you're bidding mainly on keywords which are too difficult to compete for, CTR tends to be low. For example a library bidding on keywords like "free books" or a nonprofit bidding mainly on keywords like "charity" and "donate".

Competition for keywords

There are some types of nonprofit that can struggle with low CTR even if they are using relevant keywords. This can happen when they face competition for keywords not just from other nonprofits, but also from businesses. It's especially likely in certain industries such as finance and legal. If competition is the problem then you might also see a much higher than average Cost Per Click (CPC), and the account might struggle to get Impressions.

For example I've seen a nonprofit that offers small business loans achieve a CTR only marginally above 5%. Their main competitors are banks and lenders, not other nonprofits; and the competitors have big advertising budgets. We were able to make the ads work, spend 60% of the ad grant budget, and raise the CTR to above 9%... but it was hard work and took some experimentation with bidding strategies.

Ads that don't grab people's attention

Blandly or flatly worded ads, or ads with few extensions, or no images, won't grab people's attention and that can lead to a low CTR. Try to capture people's attention with relevant, interesting text, and eye-catching images.

Putting ads onto Google Maps

Maps get lower CTR. Doesn't mean you shouldn't put ads on maps if that's useful to your nonprofit. Remember, low CTR no longer causes suspensions.

How to improve CTR

You do not have to improve CTR to be in compliance! Do not go deleting keywords or ads just because they are low CTR.

Check the Search terms report. Are people frequently searching for off-mission or generic topics, seeing your ads, then not clicking? If so, consider 1) changing the keyword and 2) adding a Negative keyword to prevent this happening. See the lesson in this course about the search terms report.

Add extensions/assets of every type that's relevant. The more you extend your ads with useful information and links, the likelier it is that people click. Sitelink assets are especially useful for raising CTR, since they can be used to present alternative urls and messaging to the main ad, giving people additional reasons to click. See this course's lesson about ad extensions.

Add headline and description extensions to test different ad text messaging. Come back and compare their CTR to the average, and use the new wording in future if it's getting better results.

Create an ad group for the brand name of the nonprofit. That should be high CTR since people are definitely searching for what's being advertised.

Check that campaigns are geo-targeted to relevant locations. If your ads are being shown in places that aren't relevant, people may not click. You can view the locations report to find out whether different countries or regions are performing less well than others for CTR.

Updated: September 2026