Understanding Click-Through-Rate

A high click-through rate is something you want to achieve, as it affects your Google ads’ performance and revenue. The question is, how do you manipulate your CTR rate and generate more clicks on your campaigns? In this post, we will go through how to calculate CTR, why it is important to have a good click-through rate, and how you can improve yours.

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A high click-through rate is something you want to achieve, as it affects your  Google ads’ performance and revenue. The question is, how do you manipulate your CTR rate and generate more clicks on your campaigns? In this post, we will go through how to calculate CTR, why it is important to have a good click-through rate, and how you can improve yours. 

What is CTR?

CTR or Click-Through-Rate as it is officially called is a widely used metric in paid digital marketing. CTR measures how many clicks an ad gets per number of impressions. You measure how many are tempted to actually click your ad, not just view it and pass by. The ratio for measuring click-through rare is the following: Clicks ÷ impressions x 100 = CTR. If your ad gets 5 clicks and 100 impressions, your CTR rate is 5%. Having a high CTR number means that a large number of website visitors who see your ad are willing to click it. While a low CTR number indicates that not many people are clicking your ad. General guidelines for a good CTR would be an average of 1.91% for search ads and 0.35% for display ads. These are just guidelines, and depend a lot on which industry and audience you are targeting. 

Why does CTR matter? 

Why should you care about your CTR percentage you may wonder? As stated before, CTR affects your ads performance and your ads performance most likely affects your revenue and success. Your CTR directly affects your Google Quality Score. A high CTR increases your quality score, which again allows you to get better ad positions for lower costs on Google. As you may know, Google always strives to provide the highest quality content to its search engine visitors. The better, more accurate, in-depth content and ads you provide, the more Google will reward you for it. A high CTR indicates that your ad has been highly relevant and helpful for users since so many have decided to click it. 

How to improve CTR? 

There’s a little more than a catchy caption and relevant keywords behind a high CTR rate. As mentioned earlier, Google foremost strives to provide the website visitors with valuable content they actually are looking for. There are some tricks down the sleeve you can use to get them to click your ads and improve your CTR rate. 

Use ad extensions

Google offers ad extensions for a reason - for you to use them. There are a number of different extensions you can use in an ad campaign. Ad extensions increase the size of your ads, gives you the opportunity to direct the visitor to the right page on your website, which again will increase the likelihood of someone clicking your ad and therefore improve your CTR rate. Sitelink, call, and price extension are popular ways to gain attention, share actual news and offers and drive the visitor to your website.

Keywords keywords keywords

Keywords are extremely important when it comes to ads and getting your ads shown to the right audience. The keywords you bid for and place in your ads should be highly relevant to your audience. If your ad is shown to the wrong audience, and they will click the ad, your CTR might improve yes, but your content is not what they are looking for and you will be wasting their time and they will be wasting your money. 

Google encourages you to add many keywords to your campaigns, and while you need a variety of keywords, be careful with adding too many keywords into one single ad group. You still want to appear in the actual search results for a specific keyword. You can group keywords into themes or tight groups to improve your chances of winning the keyword game. 

Also, remember to be very specific with which keywords you use, and avoid broad match-type keywords, as these will just diminish your budget in a blink of an eye. You still want your ad to show to people who are looking for whatever you are offering, not just having as many clicks as possible without any conversions taking place. 

Test your ads

There’s a wide range of different ads to choose from, Are search ads better than display ads in your case? Or maybe a combination of both? When you have decided which ad to go for, you can split test your ads, meaning that you can create different variations of the same ad, and just change one variable at a time to see which ads perform better and focus on these. 

Use remarketing 

If you didn’t catch ‘em the first time, try again. Remarketing is a really effective tool for getting visitors to convert. These visitors have already shown interest once but might need a little more convincing before they click that ad of yours. With remarketing campaigns, you can serve perfectly tailored ads to your visitors, as they already have shown interest in your product or services. Visitors who know you from before are more likely to click on an ad and convert into a client, which ultimately is the goal here, not just to get as many clicks as possible. 

To sum it up

Achieving a higher CTR is hopefully a bit easily accomplished now when you know what to focus on. With the correct keywords, a good ad copy you have a good base in place. Add some extensions, split test your ads and retarget them to an audience that is already familiar with you, and you will be hitting those higher CTR numbers.