Your AdWords CTR (click-through-rate) is important. Increasing CTR can improve your Quality Score, reduce the costs of your bids, and save you money.
You might be amongst the many that make the mistake of thinking that improving CTR is difficult. It will therefore shock you to discover that dramatic improvements in your AdWords CTR can often be achieved very easily if you follow some simple guidelines.
Let us first take a look at what AdWords CTR actually is.
How To Calculate AdWords CTR
The fact of the matter is that there is no great mystery about CTR. It's calculated by a simple formula: CTR = click through rate / number of impressions.
For example, imagine your ad has shown 100 times and was clicked on 4 times. Your click through rate for that ad would therefore be 4/100 or 4%.
What most advertisers don't appreciate, is that Google actually measures CTR in five different ways, and each can have a dramatic affect on your Quality Score.
Here are our 5 ways to increase your AdWords CTR.
1) Keywords Everybody knows that all AdWords keywords have a CTR.
The only way to improve a keyword CTR is to encourage people to click on the ad your keyword triggers more often.
You can achieve higher keyword CTR by:
- Increasing your bid price to make your ads appear higher on the results page so they get clicked on more often.
- Writing ads that better attract your audience's attention, by making them more appealing.
2) Your Ads' CTR
You will also probably know that each of your ads also has its own CTR value.
In order to improve the CTR of your ads:
- Include more keywords in your ad group that are relevant to your product or service so people see your ad more often.
- Create ad copy that appeals more to your prospective audience.
3) The CTR of all your Campaigns and whole Account
Believe it or not, Google also measures the collective CTR of all the campaigns in your account.
You can improve the CTR for your individual campaigns and entire account by removing keywords that are under performing.
Consider this example:
Picture a campaign that regularly gets 1000 impressions a week and 50 click throughs. This campaign therefore has a click-through-rate of 50/1000 or 5%.
Now, consider what would happen if half those impressions and a quarter of your clicks were from poor performing keywords. By poor performers, I mean that despite being shown on Google and getting regularly clicked on, these keywords never convert. If you were to delete those poor performing keywords the CTR for your campaign becomes 38/500 or 7.6%.
You have now just increased the CTR of your campaign by a massive 2.6%, saving your self a huge amount of money from wasted clicks and you have not lost a single sale.
4) Your Domain Name can also influence your CTR
It is quite common for AdWords advertisers to try and fix poor Quality Score by deleting their account and opening a new one. They are surprised when it makes no difference.
The fact of the matter is that AdWords also tracks the CTR of your domain. Your landing pages therefore must be relevant and fit in with Google's advertising guidelines. Believe it or not, some very small changes to your landing pages can have a huge impact on your CTR.
5) Historical Keyword Performance
The final part of your AdWords account against which AdWords measures CTR is the historical performance of the keywords you select. Millions of people use AdWords, and trillions of keywords have been tried in advertising campaigns. In fact there are few keywords that have not been previously tried by other advertisers.
The CTR that others have achieved with the keywords you select will have a big influence on your own CTR for that keyword.
You are probably now thinking, how can you be sure that any keyword you select doesn't have a poor historical CTR associated with it?
Type your keyword into the "Traffic Estimator" tool. This tool tells you how many clicks on your keyword you might reasonably expect to get in a day. Multiply the value you are given by 30.4 (average number of days in a month) to see how many clicks you are likely to attract for that keyword in a month.
Type your keyword phrase into the "Keyword Tool". The tool will provide you with an estimate of the number of times per month you might expect your target keyword to be used as a search term.
Divide the number of clicks a month by searches and you'll get a rough guide to Google's CTR for that keyword.
Should that CTR have a low CTR then proceed with caution. Google is informing you that your chances of succeeding with this particular keyword are limited.
Final Thoughts
Improving AdWords CTR doesn't have to be difficult, but to provide the maximum benefit to your Quality Score, you need to increase it in all five areas that Google measures.
About the Author:
Adrian Key is a professional AdWords consultant and editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for small business. If you found this article on increasing your AdWords CTR helpful, then subscribe and claim your free report at: http://www.adwords-adviser.co.uk/.
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