Partner Federation Glossary — last updated September 2026
CTR (Click-Through Rate) is the percentage of people who click a partner’s link out of everyone who actually saw it — a banner impression, an ad placement, a link in a video description. It’s the first-stage metric in the funnel, measuring whether the offer and placement earn a click at all, before conversion rate ever comes into play.
Formula: CTR = (Clicks ÷ Impressions) × 100
Why It Matters for Partners
CTR and conversion rate answer two different questions, and mixing them up leads to fixing the wrong thing. A low CTR means the link itself isn’t earning clicks — the creative, placement, or offer isn’t compelling to the audience that’s seeing it. A low conversion rate after a healthy CTR means the opposite: people are clicking, but something after the click — the landing page, the broker’s onboarding, the offer mismatch — is losing them. Metrics That Matter covers the isolate-the-source diagnostic for conversion rate specifically; CTR is the metric to check first, before assuming the problem is downstream.
CTR is most meaningful on channels where impressions are actually countable — paid social and display placements chief among them, both covered in the Marketing-Channels Playbook. It’s harder to calculate cleanly on channels like organic SEO content or a link buried in a YouTube description, where “impressions” aren’t precisely knowable — on those channels, conversion rate alone tends to be the more reliable number to track.