CTR and conversion rate formula: how to plan a campaign backwards from 1,000 orders

To plan a campaign, you work backwards from the sales target. Divide past orders by past clicks to get the conversion rate, and use it to find how many clicks you need. Then use the click-through rate (CTR) to find how many impressions you need.

Take a banana chips brand that wants 1,000 orders on Amazon. Worked through step by step, the answer comes to roughly 3.57 lakh ad impressions. This guide shows exactly how to get there, using nothing more than two ratios and some multiplication.

What does the “language of digital marketing” mean?

Eshu Sharma, co-founder of Kraftshala, calls these numbers the language of digital marketing. He says it’s the first thing you need to learn, whether you join a program or teach yourself. Memorising formulas won’t help. You need to understand what each number means.

Start with a snacks brand that sells banana chips. The MRP is ₹255 and the brand wants 1,000 orders. Multiply the two and the brand is asking you for ₹2,55,000 in sales. The question is how you get those orders.

Picture a buyer on Amazon searching for banana chips and seeing results marked “Sponsored”. Each time an ad is shown to a user, Amazon counts an impression. If the ad catches their eye, they click and land on the product page. There they check ratings, images, price and offers, or get distracted by another brand. Only some of them press “Buy now”, pay and reach the thank-you page. That final step is the order.

So every order sits at the end of a chain: impressions lead to clicks, and clicks lead to orders. Your job as a marketer is to put a number on each link.

How do you calculate conversion rate from a brand’s past data?

Start by asking the brand for its past data. Say the brand tells you that last month it got 75 orders from 1,064 clicks.

Conversion rate = (orders ÷ clicks) x 100

Here that’s 75 ÷ 1,064 x 100, which comes to roughly 7%. In plain terms: for every 100 people who click the ad and reach the product page, about 7 place an order.

Now flip it using the unitary method. If 7 orders come from 100 clicks, divide both sides by 7 and you get one order from about 14 clicks. Out of every 14 people who land on the page, one buys.

For 1,000 orders, multiply up: 1,000 ÷ 7%, which is roughly 14,285 clicks. That’s the traffic the brand needs on its product page.

Why do this in your head?

Eshu’s advice is to work these out with a pen, or better still in your head, instead of reaching for Excel or a calculator. His reason is practical: “Our recruiters, who finally get you your job, they really love people who can do these things mentally.” He credits his own 99.67 percentile in CAT to being very good at the unitary method.

Quick mental maths also comes up in interviews. If a hiring manager asks how many clicks you’d need for a target, the person who answers in ten seconds stands out. (See more digital marketing interview questions that test this kind of thinking.)

How many impressions do you need to get those clicks?

Clicks come from impressions, and the metric that links them is click-through rate.

CTR = (clicks ÷ impressions) x 100

It has the same shape as conversion rate, one step higher in the chain.

Say the brand’s past data shows a CTR of 4%. That means 4 clicks for every 100 impressions, or one click for every 25 impressions.

You already know you need about 14,285 clicks. Multiply by 25 and you need roughly 3.57 lakh impressions.

The full funnel

Put the three steps together and you have built the brand’s marketing funnel:

As Eshu puts it, none of this is rocket science. It’s two ratios and some multiplication.

Want to run these numbers on real campaigns? Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad, a digital marketing course with placement, starts with this math and then has you plan and run campaigns on Meta, Google and Amazon through live projects with real brands.

What if the brand has no past data?

New brands often have no history to share. In that case, start from category benchmarks. Look online and speak to people who work in the category to find typical CTRs and conversion rates for, say, chips or packaged snacks. Use those as your starting assumptions, then correct them as your own data comes in.

The other metrics to learn next

CTR and conversion rate are only the first two words in this language. You should also be able to calculate:

• CPC: cost per click.
• CPA: cost per order (acquisition).
• CPM: cost per thousand impressions.
• CAC and CLTV: customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value.

A simple way to learn them is to use ChatGPT or Gemini as a tutor. Tell it you already understand CTR and conversion rate, ask it to teach you CPM, CPC and the rest one by one, and then ask it to set you practice questions. Eshu says two or three days of this is enough for the metrics to feel familiar. The performance marketing tools you’ll use on the job report all of these, so it helps to know what each one means before you open a dashboard.

How do marketers improve a 7% conversion rate?

The next question is how to take conversion from 7% to 8% or 9%. These people have already reached the product page, so the fixes sit on the page and in the offer. This work is called conversion rate optimisation (CRO), and each lever comes with a cost:

• Price. A lower price will lift conversion, but every rupee off cuts your margin.
• Ratings. Better ratings and reviews make buyers more confident, but getting them takes time and effort.
• Delivery. Faster delivery helps. With Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), Amazon stores your stock and ships the order, but it charges a margin for this.
• Packaging. Higher-quality packaging, better colours and design improve how the product looks in images. This also costs money.
• Claims. If you fry in palm oil, the product is cheap to make but harder to sell. Switch to cold-pressed coconut oil, or air-fry the chips, and you have a claim worth putting on the page.

Each lever has pros and cons, and weighing them is the real work. According to Eshu, a digital marketer’s job sits inside these numbers: you decide which lever is worth paying for to move conversion by one or two points. (This is a big part of what an e-commerce manager does day to day.)

Try it yourself

Say the brand improves its ratings and conversion moves from 7% to 8%, with CTR still at 4%. How many impressions do you now need for 1,000 orders? (Answer: 1,000 ÷ 8% = 12,500 clicks, x 25 = 3.125 lakh impressions. That’s about 45,000 fewer impressions for the same sales.)

Wrapping up

A campaign plan starts with three numbers: a sales target, a conversion rate and a CTR. Working backwards from 1,000 orders gives you about 14,285 clicks and roughly 3.57 lakh impressions. Improving conversion on the product page cuts that number, but every lever has a cost. If you can do this math in your head, you can hold your own in a marketing interview and in your first week on the job.

In Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad, a digital marketing course with placement, this math is the starting point. Learners then plan and run campaigns on Meta, Amazon and Google through live projects, and get feedback from industry leaders on how their numbers moved. The program runs online for 6 months full-time or 11 months part-time. If you’d rather learn on campus, the PGP in AI-Led Marketing is a 9-month, full-time program in Gurugram. Both publish batch-wise placement reports, so you can check outcomes before you apply.