Many sellers on Ozon overrate CTR, assuming that a high click-through rate automatically leads to more sales. In this article I will break down how the Ozon algorithm actually evaluates product cards, why a high CTR can hurt you, and what to do to get stable orders.
Why CTR is overrated
CTR is the click-through rate of your product cards. Lately I keep noticing that many sellers put far too much weight on this metric.
CTR does matter. But it is a popular metric that can ultimately kill your sales.
So let us look at the logic of the Ozon algorithm: how it works and how we should work with card clickability. We do need to work with it, but in the right way.
Sellers who focus on CTR often reason like this: a card should get a lot of clicks. If people click on us, the algorithm that promotes cards gets a signal that this card deserves to be recommended further in search results to future customers.
And sellers think: if there are many clicks, then you have a great card, a precise title, a strong main image. In their view, the algorithm thinks the same way.
How the Ozon algorithm evaluates product cards
What you need to understand: the Ozon algorithm that promotes or does not promote our cards thinks completely differently. For it, a high CTR says only one thing - you captured attention at the first stage, you managed to draw attention to the card and it was clicked. But you may have captured the wrong audience.
The Ozon algorithm ranks cards not by clicks but by the whole chain of actions. It decides whether to promote a product based on the entire funnel: how many impressions, clicks, add-to-carts, orders and reviews there were. It looks at conversions at different stages. If Ozon sees impressions and clicks but no add-to-carts, no orders and no reviews, it concludes that the traffic on the card is junk and the product does not solve the buyer's problem.
Then Ozon decides: why promote a product that gets clicks but no orders when there is a specific competitor that gets both clicks and orders? Such products are heavily deboosted by the algorithm.
Precise keywords versus broad queries
The main problem is that by chasing CTR we can attract junk traffic and irrelevant keywords. Different keywords have different spelling variations and different levels of precision. There is a concept of precise semantics - a keyword that matches your product exactly.
Suppose you sell Nordic walking poles. You can write different types of keywords. You can write precise, relevant keywords: poles for seniors, telescopic poles, Nordic walking poles.
Such narrow keywords may bring few clicks, and real demand for them on the platform is indeed small. But you will get good click-through and high downstream conversions.
If a person is specifically searching for Nordic walking poles or telescopic poles for their parents, the conversion, the probability of buying your product, goes up. This leads to orders, and the algorithm sees that the card gets clicks and gets ordered and bought. The card is profitable, and the Ozon algorithm promotes such cards.
It is a different story if you add broad, irrelevant keywords. You still sell Nordic walking poles, but instead of "Nordic walking poles" and "telescopic poles" you add something like "sports" or "active leisure". It is important to understand: someone who opens Ozon and types "sports" may be looking for gym machines or something else entirely.
Yes, you can get clicks, you can have a high CTR and good clickability. On broad irrelevant keywords the cost per click in ad auctions is usually much cheaper than on narrow queries.
But many clicks do not convert into orders. This is a common problem.
The problem of irrelevant traffic
Sellers come to me for audits and say: "We run ads, we promote our cards, but there are no orders." All the effort leads to low sales volumes.
We start digging, and very often the problem sits exactly at the level of keywords and their irrelevance. Sellers add irrelevant keywords.
Click fraud and its consequences
A paradox often appears: you pay for clicks, you place broad keywords including irrelevant ones like "sports" or "leisure", and you get an artificially high CTR. Some sellers even order click fraud. I am regularly asked whether it is worth doing.
There are services that inflate clicks and behavioral metrics for Ozon. Yes, this way you can get an artificially high CTR. Ozon will register that your CTR is high, and everything seems fine.
But at the next stage of the funnel Ozon will see critically low conversions to cart, to order and to reviews, and no returns. Then Ozon will cut off your organic traffic. You wanted the best, you invested in ads and SEO and in improving these factors, and in the end you are worse off than before you started optimizing.
These services regularly write to me offering to place their ads. I understand they do not work, and I will not advertise them. The point of the Ozon algorithm is to look at the whole funnel, not at individual metrics that these services try to inflate.
The reality today is that Ozon runs strict anti-fraud that recognizes unnatural behavior very quickly. It immediately flags products that have clicks but no add-to-carts and no purchases. Such products are then demoted, deboosted, pushed down in search results, and lose sales and budgets.
Symptoms of a broken funnel
If your card has fallen into this trap, you will notice the symptoms. For example, sales stagnate or fall: you put in a lot of effort but sales do not grow. Or ads eat up the budget while positions do not improve and there is no return on investment.
Or competitors overtake you in organic search results even though you try many things. In that case I can offer several options.
A store audit as the solution
One of the most effective tools in this situation is a deep store audit. We sit down for a few days, go into your store and collect all the metrics: logistics, product cards, advertising and various other indicators.
Then we find the holes in the funnels, in the metrics and in the processes, and cut off junk traffic. At the end of the audit we show specific mistakes: here, here and here you missed something. And we give a step-by-step plan for what to do next to get results.
If you feel you have hit this problem and are rowing against the current, get in touch - we will arrange an audit.
What to look at instead of CTR
Now let me answer a question I am often asked when we discuss the marketplace-funded discount: what should we look at instead? The discount is indeed important, and I cannot rule out that it is a genuinely important indicator.
It is just that the discount is the first step. The first step of our funnel.
Imagine your incoming customers moving through the funnel. At the entrance you have the largest amount of traffic, coming from impressions into clicks. This is the maximum entry volume.
Then the funnel starts to narrow. Fewer people move to the second stage: fewer go from click to cart, even fewer from click to order, and very few from order to review. A funnel always has this shape, and that is normal.
You should look not at CTR but at the third stage of the funnel - the transition from click to order, usually from cart to order. The person saw a solution to their problem in the card: description, photos, keywords, price, reviews - everything worked, and they order the product. This metric, the cart-to-order conversion, is what needs to come back into your analysis.
But even high conversion alone guarantees nothing. There is another interesting metric I left out of this funnel: the return rate.
If returns on products are high, everything else gets multiplied by zero. That is why all these inflation tricks are useless today.
Conversion analytics is the foundation of promotion
My point is that conversion analytics at every stage is the foundation of growing a business on Ozon. When all stages of the funnel - from impression to add-to-cart, from click to add-to-cart, from order to review - work in sync and show healthy conversion, the Ozon algorithm starts promoting you for free. You grow in organic search, and ads start performing better.
And there is simply no need to use grey inflation services. Once you build your work with the sales funnel properly, these services are not needed.
They become unnecessary simply because the algorithm already promotes your products. On top of that, you stop wasting budget on irrelevant broad keywords.
What to do right now
Now let us go through what to do right now, which steps to take.
Step one - compare metrics. In your analytics, find products with high CTR but low orders. These are your first candidates for urgent funnel repair.
Step two - clean up your keywords. Open these products and look at which keywords are used. If there are irrelevant keywords in the card, it is better to remove them.
Less traffic on Ozon but more relevance, more clicks and higher conversion on these keywords is better. Then the algorithms will promote your products better in the long run.
Step three - turn off the bots. If you use click inflation services or similar, it is better to stop them today, before the algorithm imposes a shadow penalty or shadow ban on your products. If you use anything like that, it is better to switch it off.
Summary
A high CTR alone does not guarantee sales if the whole funnel is suffering. For the Ozon algorithm to promote your products, you need to watch conversion at every stage, use relevant keywords and give up inflation tricks. Then you will get stable organic traffic and order growth.
