Definition
The click-through rate is the percentage of the audience who click on a call-to-action and proceed to the next step in your campaign/customer journey. The click-through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks that your advert or CTA receives by the number of opportunities that visitors had to click (e.g number of impressions or users).
Measure Click Events in Google Tag Manager:
Clicks on a call-to-action or any element on a page can be measured by creating a simple all element click trigger and tag in Google Tag Manager. Check out this great article from Analytics Mania on everything you need to know about click tracking. You will then be able to see clicks under Behaviour > Events in the Google Analytics console.
Do all Users have the Opportunity to See the CTA or Page Element?
There is a tendency for call-to-actions to forget that many users, particularly on a mobile devices, may not scroll sufficiently down a screen to view a button or link. This means that the true click-through rate would be underestimated by including all users/unique visitors to the page.
We can use Google Tag Manager to create an element visibility tag to measure the number of users where the page element appears in their browser. The number of clicks can then be divided by the number of users who had an opportunity to see the element. This gives a more accurate measure of the click-through rate. This is especially useful for pages with dynamic content where only a subset of users are certain call-to-actions.
Total or Unique Clicks?
A common question is whether to use total clicks or unique clicks when calculating the click-through rate for a call-to-action. Total clicks count all clicks on a CTA, including multiple clicks by the same user over a session. This might include clicks from when the user returns to the same page by clicking the back button. Or if the user abandons the journey and returns to it later. Total clicks can also include submit errors when the user has not completed all the necessary information in a form.
Unique clicks ignores all but the first click from each user in the same session. The click event needs to have an identical event category, action and label. Otherwise they will be counted as multiple events. Unique clicks may ignore multiple clicks on the same CTA, but we can measure if the user proceeds to the next step in the user journey by creating an advanced custom segment using a sequence in Google Analytics.
For these reasons, unique click events are often the optimal metric to use for measuring click-through rate. They remove the noise on a website and avoid duplication of user journeys by the same visitor during a session.
Resources:
Real click-through rate – How to measure the real click-through rate for a CTA in Google Analytics.
Visibility tags – How to track element visibility in Google Tag Manager.
Funnel reports – How to automate a complex funnel visualisation in Data Studio.
