CTR (Click-Through Rate)
The percentage of people who click, out of everyone who saw the option to — and an honest word about what a headline score can and can't tell you about it in advance.
What it is
Click-Through Rate is the percentage of people who click a link — a search result, an ad, a headline in a social feed — out of everyone who was shown it. The formula is simple:
CTR = (clicks ÷ impressions) × 100
An article shown to 1,000 people that gets 30 clicks has a 3% CTR. It's one of the most-watched metrics in search, advertising, and email marketing, because it's a direct signal of how compelling a title or preview actually was in context.
What actually influences it
CTR depends on far more than the words in the headline: where the link appears on the page, what's around it, the platform's own ranking or feed algorithm, the audience's existing familiarity with the source, and pure timing all shift outcomes independent of the headline's quality. Two identical headlines can produce very different CTRs depending entirely on placement and audience.
What a headline score can and can't tell you
A tool that scores a headline out of 100 — like the Headline Analyzer — is checking structural, well-documented correlates of engagement: is the length in the range that avoids truncation, does the word mix include language known to draw interest, does it lead or end with a strong word. These are reasonable, evidence-informed signals. What such a score cannot do is predict an actual CTR percentage for your specific headline in your specific context — that depends on the platform, the audience, and everything happening around the link, none of which a text-only scoring tool can see. Treat a headline score as a structural pre-flight check, not a forecast.
Where this shows up
The Headline Analyzer's length and word-balance sub-scores are both, in different ways, checks against factors correlated with CTR — without claiming to predict it directly.
Source
Google Ads Help — Clickthrough rate (CTR): Definition.
Related
Back to the full glossary — 200 terms covering case conversion, style guides, and text tools.