In a nutshell
CTR is the share of impressions that led to a link click. The formula is clicks ÷ impressions, so if a post was shown 1,000 times and clicked 15 times, the CTR is 1.5%. The term is common in advertising, but it also works for social media posts as a number showing how many people you sent to your website or booking page.
What to watch for with social media posts
The "link clicks" shown on a network's screen are counted inside that network. Some networks separate clicks anywhere on a post from clicks on the link itself. In X's post activity, besides link clicks, there are separate rows for detail expands, media clicks, hashtag clicks and more (X post activity). When calculating CTR, unless you decide which clicks go in the numerator, your month-to-month comparisons will drift.
| What you put in the numerator | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Link clicks | The share that you sent to your site |
| Any click on the post | The share the post caught interest from |
How to use it
When CTR is low, the post may not be conveying what is behind the link. Saying specifically what people will learn or be able to do after clicking gets more clicks than "Read more here." On X, however, putting a URL in the body can make it harder to reach beyond your followers. The reason is explained in What makes a post show up in X's recommendations.
If you want to follow what visitors do after reaching your site, the reliable way is to add UTM parameters to the link and count in your website analytics.
CTR depends not only on the text and image of the post but also on how the link is presented. Adding a short phrase that tells what the page is gets more clicks than pasting a long URL as it is. When comparing, compare links of the same kind (booking pages with booking pages, product pages with product pages).
In SNS TOWN
When you replace a URL in the body with a short link in the composer, clicks by people are counted per day and shown on the post's page. Loads by machines that come to build link previews on social networks are not counted. For X, you can put it next to the impressions in Analytics and work out CTR with the same formula.
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