CTR - do people count it by page views or uniques?

[Seekness]

Hey all,

Quick question about clickthrough rates. If someone says he has a 10% CTR, does this mean that 10% of the page views for their site resulted in an ad click, or 10% of the uniques end up clicking on an ad?

Very often I'll have visitors viewing 3 or 4 pages, which results in a low CTR if I go by page views - just want to see if I'm way off the mark as compared to the other CTRs that people claim.

Thanks, as always, for your help!

[dburk]

Originally Posted by dandee0014

Hey all,

Quick question about clickthrough rates. If someone says he has a 10% CTR, does this mean that 10% of the page views for their site resulted in an ad click, or 10% of the uniques end up clicking on an ad?

Very often I'll have visitors viewing 3 or 4 pages, which results in a low CTR if I go by page views - just want to see if I'm way off the mark as compared to the other CTRs that people claim.

Thanks, as always, for your help!

Hi dandee0014,

The standard for the industry is based neither on uniques or page views, but on impressions. So a page with many ad units will usually have a much lower CTR than a page with a single ad unit. CTR is based on number of clicks per ad impression.

This is one more reason that comparing your CTR to another publisher's is usually not meaningful. I wouldn't ignore the clicks per visit or page views, however since those are both useful metrics to compare when running tests.

[marketseeker]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi dandee0014,

The standard for the industry is based neither on uniques or page views, but on impressions. So a page with many ad units will usually have a much lower CTR than a page with a single ad unit. CTR is based on number of clicks per ad impression.

This is one more reason that comparing your CTR to another publisher's is usually not meaningful. I wouldn't ignore the clicks per visit or page views, however since those are both useful metrics to compare when running tests.

An impression is a page view