For years, Click-Through Rate (CTR) was a North star for customer engagement: a clean, simple number that told us how many people “engaged.” It fitted neatly into dashboards and reports. To answer the obvious question, yes, 100% you should still measure CTR. However, to do it with the knowledge that in 2025, the link between CTR and it being a measure of overall success, especially for brands investing in sophisticated customer engagement ecosystems is fraying.
The next question is why? CTR tells you if someone clicked. It doesn’t tell you why they clicked, what happened next or whether it mattered. Clicks are still a positive intent signal but the risk is that you can learn the wrong lessons: Is it great copy that drove the click, is it that user’s place in their journey, is it the timing of the message landing or the fact they’ve just seen an ad of yours on the TV or on their social feed.
The challenge is that it’s a surface-level signal that rewards immediacy over impact. In the batch and blast age where customer engagement was more linear and less cross-channel, CTR mattered more because more clicks often correlated with success much more tightly but this was against a backdrop of less visibility and each channel being treated as its own walled garden. As marketing enters its agentic era it has evolved towards continuous, complex and individual conversations: CTR is not as useful for truly understanding how lasting engagement and meaningful value are created or attributed.
Think about it: a customer might click an email, start an app session and leave. Another might see every message for months as your brand builds awareness and consideration, then come back organically to make a high-value purchase. The first boosts your CTR; the second drives your business. Which one will drive brand growth more?
Modern CRM is about outcomes, not opens. The best engagement programs optimise for building value across both the short and long-term customer lifecycle: adoption, engagement, retention, adoption and contribution margin. That’s the realm of incremental impact: understanding how messaging influences a customer’s likelihood to do something valuable at some point later, not just to click now.
This is where brands using agentic, data-driven systems like Aampe’s are moving. They use CTR but they also look beyond CTR to metrics such as incremental conversion rate, session lift, order frequency, customer lifetime value and downstream revenue impact. These are metrics that reflect alignment, learning and improvement over time. These agentic systems test, adapt and personalize continuously, using each message as part of a dynamically evolving experiment rather than a static send.
CTR belongs to an era when messaging was broadcast. Today, engagement is individual, dynamic and compounding. Measuring success through clicks is like judging a relationship by how often someone likes your instagram posts - it misses the point.
So let’s move CTR out from its place as a headline metric. It’s time to measure what truly matters: the sustained, measurable impact your messaging has on customer behavior and business growth: Because the goal of modern engagement isn’t to get clicks — it’s to create relationships that compound value.