Ok I forgot about the 2 day delay that itch has for new paid games. My game currently can't be found in the search. Yesterday right after I launched, I put a demo on Newgrounds, which pointed people to the full (paid) game here on itch.io, got a ton of traffic, & for a while my CTR was really good (like 4% - I don't know about anyone else, but I consider that a good CTR).
But I forgot that my game won't appear in the "new & popular" until someone at itch reviews & approves it. So that now when it appears in the search, my CTR will be a lot lower, it's dropped now to less than 2%.
I know I might be over-thinking this, but maybe if I'd done this again, I'd wait to put my incoming links in place until after it appears in search, so that I could take advantage of the high CTR (because I think a high CTR on itch gets your game further up the top of the list).