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What the number says
CTR, click-through rate, is the share of impressions where someone clicked: two hundred clicks on four thousand impressions is 5 percent. It mainly shows how well your ad matches what someone searched for. An ad that names exactly the service and the city searched for gets more clicks than a generic one. Google counts your expected CTR in your quality score and in the ranking, so an ad that gets clicked more can rank higher for less. How a local campaign works is in how does Google Ads work for local businesses; the term itself under CTR.
Click-through rate per industry, search ads
Average click-through rate, search adsUS measurement, 2026
- Real estate7.61%
- Restaurants and food6.83%
- All industries6.64%
- Home and home improvement6.47%
- Business services6.10%
- Legal services5.87%
- Dentists5.66%
- Auto repair5.56%
What your ad puts first, per industry
| Industry | What belongs in the headline or copy |
|---|---|
| Construction and home | the service plus the town |
| Restaurants and food | address, opening hours and whether you take bookings |
| Legal services | your specialism, not your name |
| Dentists | whether you take new patients, and online booking |
| Auto repair | your phone number and whether you can help today |
| Business services | a concrete benefit with a number |
Compare with yourself first: your own click-through rate of last quarter, per ad group, is a better yardstick than any industry average, especially as public benchmarks are mostly American. Three things move your rate outside your ad. An AI summary above many results leaves fewer clicks, as is SEO dead explains. Dynamic Search Ads are folding into AI Max, where Google picks more search terms itself; see the news on AI Max. And ads in ChatGPT are arriving in Europe, with their own click behaviour; see ChatGPT ads in Europe.
What 3 against 6 percent costs
| CTR | Clicks at 10,000 impressions | Cost at 2.50 euro a click | Enquiries at 5 percent conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 percent | 300 | 750 euro | 15 |
| 6 percent | 600 | 1,500 euro | 30 |
More clicks cost more, so a higher CTR is not cheaper per month by itself. The gain lies in what you get from the same impressions, and in a lower click price because expected CTR counts. What matters is the cost per enquiry: work it out with the ROAS calculator and the Google Ads budget calculator, and see what you spend per month in Google Ads cost.
When you sit below the average
- Put the search term, or the service and the city, literally in the headline.
- Split campaigns per service, so each ad fits one group of search terms.
- Exclude search terms unrelated to your offer, such as jobs or free.
- Add your phone number, address and links to your key pages.
- Test two versions of an ad against each other and keep the better one.
If your click-through rate is fine but enquiries stay away, the page is the problem: a landing page that delivers what the ad promises gets more from the same clicks.