CTR (click-through rate) is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, expressed as a percentage. If an ad or a search result is shown 10,000 times and clicked 400 times, its CTR is 4%.
Why it matters
CTR is the first gate in the Amazon funnel. Before a shopper can read your bullets or watch your video, they have to choose your tile over the ten or twenty around it. A low CTR means you are paying for impressions that never become visits, and it also feeds back into rank: Amazon's algorithm rewards listings that shoppers pick when shown, so a weak CTR makes the same keyword harder to hold organically.
In advertising, CTR also affects cost. A campaign with a strong CTR tends to win placements at a lower cost per click than a campaign with the same bid and a weak CTR, because Amazon wants to show ads shoppers act on.
What moves it
- The main image. On a search page the image is the biggest element in the tile. Scale, contrast against white and a clear view of what the product is decide most clicks.
- Price and the deal badge. A price that sits above the neighbors without a visible reason loses clicks. A coupon or deal badge often gains them.
- Rating and review count. A 4.6 with 2,000 reviews beats a 4.6 with 40.
- The first 70 to 80 characters of the title. That is roughly what shows on mobile before truncation.
- Placement and keyword relevance. An ad on a loosely related search term will always click worse than the same ad on an exact-intent term. Compare CTR by placement and by match type, not as one blended number.
How we use it
We read CTR by keyword and by placement in the Search Term and Placement reports, and organic CTR by query in Search Query Performance. When CTR is below the category norm for a keyword the listing is otherwise relevant for, the fix is the tile, not the bid: we test the main image and title through Manage Your Experiments before we touch spend.