Does Click Through Rate (CTR) Directly Influence Rankings?

Click through rate (CTR) is one of the important metrics when it comes to measuring the success of an online marketing strategy. CTR ratio of social media posts will give you a measure of the views for your future posts. CTR ratio for your ads will give you a measure of the reach on your targeted customers and CTR ratio of your organic search will give you a measure of the value of your page for your visitors.

CTR, the Challenges & Benefits Involved

CTR has been considered as one of the reasons for search engine rankings. The more number of CTR the better the rankings, but it’s not always been the case.

Sites usually improved their authority based on the quality of the content and its brand visibility. Some reports do suggest that increased CTR has resulted in increased rankings. They seem to increase proportionally although they do not have any direct effect to each other.

There has been both sides to this theory that increased CTR results in increase in ranking. Some websites when tested with artificial traffic to increase CTR resulted in the sites moving up in its rankings. While some tests with artificial CTR resulted in the rankings being stagnant over a period of time only start falling in the end. There are factors like wrong setup of a particular experiment, CTR being stopped as a factor for ranking, or other factors that could have influenced these results.

In the confusing world of Google Algorithms where nothing can be concluded as a certainty the above experiments remains inconclusive too with both experiments showing conflicting reports. The only conclusion that one can come to is that CTR has also proved not be a factor in Google rankings, it is safe to suggest that CTR is not a definite ranking factor and if someone is completely depending on CTR ration for improving their site rankings its good they do rework on the marketing strategy and concentrate on other factors too like on page optimization and content quality to be sure of an increase in search engine rankings.