A good click-through rate for Google Ads depends on whether you’re running Search or Display campaigns, but the overall average across industries is about 6.64% for Search ads and 0.57% for Display ads. If your Search campaigns are hitting 6% or higher, you’re in solid territory. Anything above your industry’s average means your ads are resonating better than most competitors.
Search Ads vs. Display Ads
The gap between Search and Display CTR is enormous, and understanding why matters more than the numbers themselves. People clicking on Search ads typed a query into Google with intent. They want something specific, and your ad appeared as a potential answer. Display ads, on the other hand, show up while someone is reading a blog post or watching a video. They’re not looking for your product, so naturally fewer people click.
A 0.57% average CTR on Display is not a sign of failure. Display campaigns are often designed for brand awareness rather than direct response, so measuring them against Search benchmarks would be misleading. Judge each campaign type against its own standard.
Average CTR by Industry
Your industry shifts what “good” looks like dramatically. Based on data covering January 2024 through February 2025, here’s how average CTRs break down across major sectors:
- Software: 9.88%
- Health and Healthcare Services: 2.43%
- Pet Care: 2.13%
- Online Marketplaces: 1.88%
- Gaming: 1.76%
- Furniture and Home Décor: 1.63%
- Automotive: 1.56%
- Office Supplies and Stationery: 1.50%
- Apparel and Accessories: 1.26%
- Travel and Hospitality: 1.12%
- Jewelry and Luxury Goods: 0.97%
- Food and Beverage: 0.93%
Software stands out as an outlier because those searches tend to be highly specific. Someone searching for “project management software” knows what they need, and a well-targeted ad naturally earns more clicks. Industries like food and beverage or jewelry tend to attract more casual browsing, which pushes CTR lower. If you’re running a jewelry brand and hitting 1.5%, you’re well above average for your space, even though that number would look weak in software.
Why CTR Matters Beyond Clicks
CTR directly feeds into your Quality Score, which is Google’s rating of how relevant and useful your ads are. Quality Score has three components: expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Expected CTR is Google’s estimate of how likely someone is to click your ad when it shows for a given keyword, based on historical performance.
A higher Quality Score can lower your cost per click and improve your ad position. Two advertisers bidding the same amount on the same keyword can end up in very different positions if one has a significantly better Quality Score. In practical terms, improving your CTR from below average to above average for your industry can mean paying less for better placement, stretching your budget further without increasing your bids.
When a High CTR Is a Problem
A high CTR with few conversions (actual purchases, signups, or leads) often signals a disconnect somewhere in the funnel. The most common cause is a mismatch between what the ad promises and what the landing page delivers. If your ad highlights a discount but the landing page shows full-price products, visitors click and then leave. That costs you money with nothing to show for it.
Targeting the wrong keywords creates the same issue. Broad match keywords can pull in people searching for loosely related terms. They click because the ad looks relevant enough, but their intent doesn’t match what you’re selling. On the Display Network, ads showing on low-quality placements like gaming apps or parked domains can also inflate your CTR with accidental taps that never convert.
A useful gut check: look at your CTR alongside your conversion rate. If CTR is climbing but your cost per conversion is rising or your conversion rate is falling, your clicks are getting less qualified, not more valuable.
How to Improve Your CTR
The most reliable way to raise CTR is making your ad copy more specific to the keyword being searched. Generic headlines like “Great Products, Great Prices” get ignored. A headline that mirrors the searcher’s exact need, like “Same-Day Office Chair Delivery,” gives people a reason to click.
Ad extensions (now called assets in Google Ads) also help by making your ad physically larger on the results page. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and phone numbers all add useful information and take up more screen space, which increases the likelihood of a click at no extra cost per impression.
Tightening your keyword targeting matters just as much. Review your search terms report regularly to find irrelevant queries triggering your ads, then add those as negative keywords. This filters out people who were never going to convert and concentrates your impressions on the audience most likely to click and follow through.
Finally, test multiple ad variations within each ad group. Google will automatically favor the version that performs best, but you need to give it options. Change one element at a time, whether that’s the headline, the description, or the call to action, so you can identify what’s actually driving improvement.
Setting Your Own Benchmark
Industry averages are a starting point, not a ceiling. Your real benchmark is your own account’s performance over time. A campaign with a 3% CTR in an industry that averages 1.5% is doing well, but if that same campaign was at 4% last month, the drop deserves investigation.
Track CTR at the keyword and ad group level rather than just the campaign level. Campaign-wide CTR can mask problems. You might have one ad group performing at 8% and another dragging things down at 1%. The overall number looks fine, but you’re leaving money on the table by not fixing the underperformer. Segment your data, compare against your own history, and use industry benchmarks as a reality check rather than a target.