Glossary
The percentage of impressions that turn into clicks, measured at the link (or thumbnail) level. A packaging metric that predicts how many people ever see the integration.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of impressions that turn into clicks. On YouTube, it specifically measures how many people click the video's thumbnail to open it, which is the precondition for anyone seeing your integration.
CTR is a packaging metric. It tells you how well the creator's thumbnail and title draw an audience, which determines how many people ever see the sponsored segment inside the video. A creator with a high CTR gets their videos opened, which is the first step in the conversion funnel. A creator with a low CTR has a large subscriber count but few people actually clicking through to watch, so the integration reaches fewer viewers than the subscriber count suggests. On YouTube, CTR pairs with watch-through (do they stay) to predict how many attentive viewers see the integration. Read the analytics key metrics article for the full YouTube analytics set.
Infmap surfaces CTR at discovery alongside watch-through, average views, and audience demographics, so a brand can see whether a creator's packaging actually draws an audience before booking them. At the deal level, the UTM-tagged link generated at deal creation lets the brand measure click-through from the creator's content to the brand's landing page, which is a different CTR (content-to-landing-page) from the YouTube CTR (thumbnail-to-video). Both matter, and Infmap tracks the one tied to your conversion rate.
A brand compares two creators with similar subscriber counts. Creator A has a 9% thumbnail CTR and a 55% average view duration. Creator B has a 3% thumbnail CTR and a 20% average view duration. A's packaging draws three times the audience and keeps them watching, so the integration reaches far more attentive viewers. The brand books A. The CTR signal at discovery predicted the reach difference before the deal was signed.