CTR (Click Through Rate)

Click Through Rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who viewed an ad or a link on a website and then clicked on that ad/link. The CTR is calculated by dividing the number of people who clicked on the advertisement by the total number of people who viewed the page.

Why is click through rate important?

 

Click through rate is an important metric in that it indicates how appealing an ad is to an audience. A high CTR means the audience finds the ad appealing.

However, in isolation, CTR is a limited metric. The reason is an ad campaign is generally designed to achieve sales or leads. This means CTR is a far more useful metric when the advertiser takes the landing page's conversion rate into consideration.

For instance, an ad with a high click through rate but low conversion rate is a possible sign that the ad appeals to the wrong audience or the ad's message does not match with the landing page.

What is an average CTR?

Average click through rate is a ratio of clicks an ad in Google Ads receives measured against the impressions it gets.

Is a high CTR good or bad?

Although it's not always true, high click through rates generally tend to correlate with higher conversion rates. This could be attributed to the fact that if users are clicking the ad, there is something engaging about the offer.

Also, a high click through rate on a Google Ad will have a high engagement rate which could result in an increased Quality Score. This could result in an increase in Impression Share and a decrease in cost per click.

How to increase CTR?

Here are some general guidelines for increasing click through rates.

Ad Copy

The reason people click on an ad is the ad triggers a desire in them. The ad links the desire to a promise in the form of a product or service. The more the product or service answers the audience's desire, the more appealing it will be to them. Therefore, by truly understanding the audience's desires and focusing the ad on promising a product or service that will bring the audience closer to that desire, the advertiser will be able to improve the ad's click through rate.

Focus on Longtail Keywords

Unlike broad keywords, longtail keywords have a clear specific meaning. This means if an ad is targeting a longtail keyword, since the meaning of the keyword is clear and focused, it is easy to create an ad that services the audience's search intent. On the other hand, a broad keyword tends to be vague in meaning. As a result, it will have a broad audience with multiple search intents typing it into search engines. It is impossible to appeal to all search intents. As a result, it will have a low CTR.

Continuously Split Test Ad Copy

An advertiser should be consistently testing new ad copy. This means two or more variations of an ad are created within one ad group. The advertiser will then monitor which ad performs the best. When it is clear that one ad performs better than the other, the worst-performing ad should be paused and a new ad should be created in its place. This way the ads should be constantly improving, which will in turn improve the click through rates.

Write Compelling Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Title tags are the first thing a searcher sees when looking at organic results. In order to improve organic click through rates, the SEO should include the search term in the title stage. Also, the title tag can be used to attract attention by including emotional words.

The searcher will then look at the meta description. A meta description is a short paragraph used to describe what the page is about. It can be optimized to increase CTR by focusing on describing how the content answers the search query.

Use Schema Markup

Although a page can achieve SERP features without schema markup, implementing it can greatly increase a page's chances. Due to their visual nature, SERP features can greatly increase an organic result's CTR.

Use Ad Extensions

When advertising in Google Ads, CTR can be increased by including ad extensions. The reason this works is it increases the size of the ad which makes it more visually appealing. At the same time, it adds information into the ad that might make it more appealing to searchers.

What is a good CTR?

 

There is no one definitive answer to this. At best there are industry benchmarks that a business can work toward and each industry has its own benchmarks. However, what is considered a good CTR can change from campaign to campaign and from platform to platform.

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