Click-Through Rate: An Overview of Scientific Research in Management

Abstract

Since the introduction of online advertising, an increasing number of advertisers and firms are relying on this ad type to acquire consumers, making it an important revenue source for search engines and other internet giants like Google, Amazon, etc. Clicks are used as a metric in two ways: (i) for advertisers, it is used to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement, and (ii) for internet companies, it is used as a quality metric for their search engine or website. The click-through rate is the ratio of the number of impressions to the number of clicks of an advertisement. Managers are using this metric to allocate the budget for their advertisement campaigns based on their effectiveness. In the last decade, due to the growing industry demand, it has attracted scholars from industry and academia. This literature review article examines click-through rate evolution from an empirical standpoint using the bibliometric methods, reviewing 596 articles from the Scopus index. This review article (i) identifies the most influential articles, authors, and journals, serving as a baseline for future research, and (ii) charts the evolution of the topic over the last decade, assisting managers and future researchers in gaining a performance-based comprehensive view of click-through rate.