Why is my click-through rate (CTR) lower this week?

First, confirm the CTR drop is real (and pinpoint exactly where it’s happening)

When someone tells me “CTR dropped this week,” my first step is to turn that into a clean comparison. A week-over-week CTR change can be completely legitimate, but it can also be a reporting artifact (different day-of-week mix), a traffic-mix shift (more mobile, more partner traffic, more top-of-funnel queries), or a single campaign/ad group dragging the average down.

Use a like-for-like date comparison (same days of week)

Compare the most recent 7 days to the previous 7 days, and make sure you’re matching the same number of weekdays/weekend days. For example, if today is January 13, 2026, a clean comparison is January 6–12, 2026 vs. December 30, 2025–January 5, 2026. If your business is sensitive to weekends (many are), a “Mon–Sun vs. Mon–Sun” comparison is far more reliable than “last 7 days” viewed on different days.

Don’t diagnose CTR at the account level

Account CTR is an average of many different auctions. A “drop” often comes from one of these: one campaign suddenly getting more impressions, one brand campaign losing top placement, or a new keyword match pulling in broad, low-intent queries. Your job is to find where the CTR changed and what changed at the same time.

• Sort by biggest impression increase (campaigns/ad groups/keywords). CTR often falls simply because you’re showing more often in auctions you weren’t winning before.
• Segment by device (mobile vs. desktop). A device-mix shift can move CTR meaningfully even if nothing is “wrong.”
• Segment by network (core search vs. search partners, if applicable). Partner inventory can behave very differently and can dilute CTR even while adding incremental volume.
• Check ad and keyword status for “limited” or review-related issues that reduce eligibility or disrupt serving consistency.
• Review change history for the exact date the CTR shifted—bids, budgets, targeting, keyword edits, assets, schedules, and automation settings can all move CTR fast.

The most common reasons CTR drops week-to-week (and how to prove each one)

1) You lost position or visibility due to Ad Rank pressure (competition changed)

CTR is heavily position-dependent. If competitors became more aggressive (higher bids, better creatives, stronger assets, better relevance), your ads may still show—but in lower positions, or less frequently in top placements—pulling CTR down. In real accounts, this is one of the most common “nothing changed on my side” CTR drops.

How to prove it: Look at impression share diagnostics. If you see more “lost due to rank,” you’re losing auctions you previously won, or you’re winning them in weaker positions. Then check competitive signals like Auction insights to see whether others are appearing above you more often, overlapping more frequently, or taking a larger share of eligible impressions.

2) Budget constraints changed your traffic mix (you’re showing at “worse times”)

When budgets are tight, delivery gets uneven. You may stop showing during your highest-intent hours (when competition is strongest) and end up serving more in cheaper, lower-intent auctions—often with lower CTR. This can happen even if total impressions look stable.

How to prove it: Check lost impression share due to budget and compare hour-of-day performance (or day-of-week). If CTR is stable in your historically strong segments but you’re gaining impressions elsewhere, you’ve got a delivery mix issue, not necessarily an ad copy issue.

3) Your ads started triggering for different queries (match behavior, close variants, or automation expansion)

Week-to-week CTR drops are frequently query-mix problems. If you expanded keywords, changed match types, added broad targeting, loosened location/audience settings, or enabled an expansion feature, you can suddenly enter a lot of new auctions. Those impressions are “real,” but the intent is often broader—so CTR falls.

Two especially common culprits are close variants (which apply across match types) and query expansion from automation. Close variants can match to searches that are similar in meaning/intent, not necessarily identical in wording, which is great for scale but can surprise advertisers when it changes the visible query mix.

How to prove it: Use the search terms report to compare “this week vs. last week.” You’re looking for new categories of terms, a surge in informational phrases, or terms that technically relate but don’t match your offer. If you find irrelevant terms, add negatives thoughtfully (over-blocking can reduce volume and can also prevent automated systems from finding valuable searches).

4) An ad/asset change lowered relevance or made the message less compelling

CTR doesn’t just respond to your offer; it responds to how clearly the offer matches the searcher’s intent in the limited space on the results page. If you edited headlines/descriptions, pinned too aggressively, removed a strong call-to-action, or swapped to a weaker landing page theme, CTR can drop quickly.

If you use responsive ads, also pay attention to Ad Strength as a practical diagnostic tool. It’s not a “serving lever,” but it’s a strong indicator of whether you’re giving the system enough unique, relevant options to assemble competitive messages for different intents.

5) Policy/review status limited eligibility (even partially)

Policy labels and review events can reduce where and how often ads serve. Even when your ads are still technically “eligible,” a limitation can restrict certain placements, locations, audiences, or formats. The practical result is often a quieter but noticeable performance shift: fewer high-performing impressions, more leftover impressions, and lower CTR.

How to prove it: Check the status column for ads, assets, keywords, and destinations. Also review any policy manager alerts and recent review events around the date CTR changed.

6) Network mix changed (search partners added or suddenly started contributing more volume)

If search partners are enabled, you can see CTR fluctuations that don’t mirror core search behavior. Partner sites can present ads differently, and clicks may not always reflect the same level of intent as core search. Importantly, lower CTR on partner inventory doesn’t necessarily mean your ads are “bad,” but it can pull down the blended CTR you see in platform averages.

How to prove it: Segment performance by network. If core search CTR is stable but partner CTR dropped (or partner impressions surged), you’ve found the explanation. From there, decide whether partner volume aligns with your goals, and test excluding it if it’s dragging efficiency or lead quality.

7) Automated creative features changed what users saw (text customization / AI settings)

If you’re using AI-assisted text generation features that create additional headlines/descriptions based on your site, existing ads, and keywords, your visible message can change without you editing the ad manually. That’s often positive long-term, but week-to-week it can introduce learning, experimentation, and message shifts that move CTR.

How to prove it: Review asset details and “served” asset reporting. Look for newly introduced automatically generated text assets, shifts in top-performing headline combinations, or messaging that’s accurate but less compelling than your best manual copy.

Fixes that reliably raise CTR (without tanking lead quality)

Start with relevance: tighten the mapping between intent, keyword, ad group, and ad copy

The most sustainable CTR improvements come from intent alignment, not gimmicks. If CTR dropped because you expanded into broader auctions, your best fix is to split intent into separate ad groups (or campaigns) and tailor messaging. High-intent queries want specificity (pricing, availability, service area, exact product), while early-stage queries want clarity and proof (benefits, differentiators, trust, fast next step).

As you tighten relevance, use the search terms report as your feedback loop. Promote winners into dedicated ad groups, and block truly irrelevant terms with negatives. If you’re running more automated campaign types, use exclusions carefully and prioritize the most precise controls available for brand-related filtering where appropriate.

Improve your “ad package,” not just the headline: strengthen assets and on-page consistency

In competitive auctions, your CTR is often won by the total ad experience: strong headlines, a clear offer, and high-impact assets that make the ad larger and more useful. Add every asset that genuinely helps a user choose you (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, images where eligible). Assets can improve prominence and expected click impact, but they work best when they reinforce a single, coherent promise.

Also keep the landing page message consistent with the ad. If users don’t trust the click (because the page feels mismatched), the platform learns that your ads are less satisfying for that intent over time, which can show up as weaker expected CTR and softer overall performance.

Use impression share metrics to decide whether CTR needs creative work or auction work

If you’re losing significant impression share due to rank, you can write better ads all day and still struggle to stabilize CTR because you’re not showing in the placements that generate strong engagement. In that case, you typically need a combination of stronger relevance (keyword/ad/landing page alignment), improved asset coverage, and bids/targets that allow you to compete in the auctions you actually want.

If you’re losing impression share due to budget, fix delivery first. Otherwise, you’ll keep measuring CTR on a changing slice of auctions.

Control volatility: isolate changes and avoid stacking experiments

When CTR drops “this week,” the fastest path back is usually to stop the bleeding and reduce variables. Avoid changing bids, budgets, targeting, ads, and automation settings all in the same day. Undo or roll back the most suspicious recent change first (the one that aligns with the CTR drop date), then let performance stabilize before layering additional optimizations.

A practical “CTR recovery” checklist I use in real accounts

• Locate the drop: campaign → ad group → keyword/search term, and segment by device + network.
• Confirm eligibility: look for limited/review/policy statuses affecting ads, assets, keywords, or destinations.
• Check auction pressure: impression share losses due to rank/budget + competitor movement in auction diagnostics.
• Audit query quality: identify new low-intent themes in search terms; add negatives only where truly necessary.
• Refresh messaging where it matters: rewrite RSAs to cover top intents, reduce redundancy, avoid over-pinning, and ensure at least one strong ad per ad group.
• Rebuild asset coverage: add missing assets that make your ad more useful and specific; ensure each asset supports the same promise.

If you want, tell me which campaign type you’re looking at (Search vs. Performance Max vs. Shopping vs. Display/Video), whether search partners are enabled, and the exact dates you’re comparing. With just those details, I can tell you which 2–3 diagnostics usually find the cause fastest for your situation.

If your CTR dropped this week, start by confirming it’s a real change (compare a clean Mon–Sun week to the previous Mon–Sun, then zoom into the specific campaigns and ad groups driving the decline) and map the timing against Google Ads Change History to rule out “fake” drops caused by day-of-week mix or one outlier. Next, segment performance by device and network, since a shift toward mobile traffic or Search Partners can pull down blended CTR even when core Google Search is stable, and check for eligibility or policy/review issues that may have limited your best ads, assets, keywords, or landing pages. From there, look for auction pressure (higher competition can push you into lower positions), budget constraints that change when your ads show (more impressions during weaker hours), query-mix drift in the Search Terms report (broader or less relevant searches), and recent RSA/asset edits or auto-generated asset serving that may have changed your message. If you want a faster way to pinpoint whether it’s traffic mix, rank, budget, queries, or creative, Blobr connects to your Google Ads and runs specialized AI agents that continuously audit these exact areas—like optimizing callout extensions and improving landing-page-to-ad alignment—so you get a clear, prioritized set of fixes without having to manually chase every report.