What CTR (link click) measures
Meta counts several different kinds of click on an ad. Someone can tap the image to expand it, tap your page name, react to the post, open the comments, or tap the link that takes them to your website. The headline click-through rate in Ads Manager, labelled CTR (all), counts all of those. CTR (link click) counts only the last one, divided by impressions.
That single restriction is what makes it useful. It answers whether the ad persuaded people to leave the feed, rather than whether it made them pause and poke at it. A post that collects plenty of reactions and image expands can carry a healthy CTR (all) while its link click rate stays flat, and the flat number is the one that predicts traffic.
Why CTR (link click) matters
It is the cleanest early read on whether the creative and the offer match the audience you bought. Impressions tell you the ad was delivered; the link click rate tells you it was wanted. Because it moves within hours of launch, it is usually the first metric worth looking at on a new ad set, long before there are enough conversions to judge anything.
It also feeds cost. Meta’s auction favours ads that people engage with, so a rising link click rate tends to pull the cost per click, and often the cost per result, down with it even when nothing about the bid changed. A weak rate has the opposite effect: you pay more for the same traffic.
Common mistakes with CTR (link click)
The most common one is comparing the wrong two numbers. Some column sets show CTR (all) by default, so one report quotes the broad figure and the next quotes the link version, and the ads look as though they improved when only the column changed. Settle the column set before drawing any conclusion.
The second is treating a high rate as success on its own. Bait headlines, a discount the landing page does not honour, or a thumb-stopping image with nothing to do with the product all lift the rate and damage everything after it. Judge it with cost per result beside it, never alone.
The third is reading it across placements without splitting them. Feed, Stories and Reels behave differently enough that a blended figure hides which placement is actually working.
How to act on it
Break the metric down by ad first, then by placement, then by audience — the ad creative is usually the cause. If one image or one opening line is carrying the ad set, produce variations of that rather than replacing the whole batch. If every ad in the set reads low, the problem is more often the audience or the promise than the artwork.
When the rate falls over time on an ad that used to work, that is creative fatigue rather than a targeting fault, and the fix is new material. Where the click rate is healthy but few people reach the site, the loss sits between the tap and the page, which the click to landing page view ratio will show you. That is a hosting and speed question, not an advertising one.