When marketing your brand on the internet, Click-Through Rate (CTR) is one of the most important metrics that help you measure the number of clicks your advertisement has received on the number of ad impressions. This simply means you need to achieve a high click-through rate to get more customers on your website. On the other hand, a high click-through rate also indicates the success of your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign.
This is because the click-through rate directly influences the quality score of your ads and the amount of money you will be paying every time someone clicks on your ads. Today, with the help of this article, we are going to help you get familiar with the click-through rate, its importance, how it works, and how you can make your click-through rate go higher with a few tips and tricks. So let’s begin.
Click-Through Rate: How Does It Work?
When search engines determine how much users must pay for pay-per-click, they typically target keywords with high data traffic. The whole model of pay-per-click works on the concept that the more clicks that your website gets, the more money the search engine is going to make in the end. But when you are on the other hand, meaning when you are the person who is bidding for the PPC, you are always looking to lower the rate of pay-per-click. This will help you acquire more clicks at a much lower cost.
So how does a click-through rate work? Well, let’s take an example here; suppose you have created a PPC campaign where you got 1000 impressions for the ad that you have put up on the search engine. From those 1000 impressions, you get 100 clicks. As a result, the click-through rate of that specific PPC campaign is going to be 10%. When we look at the meaning of CTR, we can say it is a metric that helps us understand how relevant our ads are in comparison to the searches made for the specific keyword that we have targeted in the PPC campaign.
So if you have a higher CTR, that means your ad campaigns are landing in the right spot, and they are highly relevant to what the customers are searching for.
On the other hand, if you have low CTR, that means your ads are not performing well or up to the mark, and when a customer sees them online, they don’t find them relevant to their search intent.
So the ultimate goal that you have in maintaining the PPC campaign is that it needs to attract qualified users to your website and help you perform the desired action. This could be making a purchase, filling out a lead or a contact form, or it could also divert users into downloading a specific document such as a brochure or other things.
Is a 100% click-through rate good enough?
Absolutely, if you are able to get anywhere more than 10% of CTR, you are good to go. But if you think you are able to get a 100% click-through rate, then it is not going to happen. There is no way one can get a 100% click-through rate on a single or even multiple campaigns. There are a number of online platforms, such as search engines, YouTube, and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more. On all of these different platforms, you can run a PPC ad campaign and make your content more visible to the audience in your niche. But still, it is hard to get anywhere between 5% and 10% of CTR.
So if you have the question, is having a 100% click-through rate good enough? The answer is that it is the best one can get from their PPC campaign. But the truth behind this number is that it is superficial. The good-enough click-through rate ranges from 5% to 10%. If you are going anywhere above these numbers, you have an excellent CTR, and it will benefit your business.
The Difference Between CTR In Competitive And Non-Competitive Industry
Some of the PPC experts also recommend having a 2% to 5% click-through rate when you are targeting competitive industries. After that, for non-competitive industries, you are going to have a 5% click-through rate. Thus, we can see for ourselves that the average click-through rate is higher for non-competitive industries because customers are going to have fewer choices and they are more likely to click on the results that are shown to them. Let’s take an example to make the difference between competitive and non-competitive industries clearer.
Think of yourself as selling a vintage watch collection online; the odds of you having high competition online are very rare. As a result, when someone searches for a vintage watch collection online, your ads are going to appear at the top of the results. Along with this, the chances of your website is shown in the organic search results will also be much higher.
Now, if you have a friend who is in the business of providing digital marketing services such as SEO, SEM, content writing, copywriting, and more, then he needs to pay a lot in order to get his ads shown on search engines and other platforms. That is because of the competition in online digital marketing services, and there is a lot of competition for the keywords that you are targeting for the ads. This will also lead you to have fewer impressions for the amount you pay, and the chances of you getting a higher CTR will also be lower. That’s because other digital marketing service providers are also running the ads.
Here, you can expect the CTR to be somewhere between 2% and 5%. It could get lower than this as well, but the average competitive CTR should remain in between these two figures. One thing you need to know is that PPC ads will also add to your content network, and it will cause lower CTR as well as lower conversion rates.
Methods to Increase your Click-Through Rate
It is impossible to manage your Google Ads account efficiently if you do not structure it properly. The result could be a low CTR for your ads. In addition to this, there are other factors that influence your click-through rate. The purpose of this article is to show you how to increase the click-through rate of your ads and make those money-sucking campaigns profitable.
1. Enhance Your Quality Score
One of the first things you can start with is enhancing your quality score. Quality is a metric tracked by Google Ads in which each keyword is given a score from 0 to 10. With these scores, Google Ads is able to determine the relevance and quality of your advertising. Apart from this, the quality score also depicts the probability of someone clicking on your ad based on the keyword. With higher quality, you are going to receive higher rankings on ads. In addition to this, with better quality scores, you also have to pay less per click.
With higher-ranking keywords, you will be able to secure a prominent position on the page, which will result in a higher number of clicks. However, in order to obtain those keywords at a reasonable cost, you need to work on your quality score. There are many ways in which the quality score could be increased as it depends on the relevance of your landing page, the topicality of your ads, copywriting used in the ads, its headline, description, and even the URL of your ad.
2. Choose the best ad extensions
Right now, there are more than ten different types of extensions, and the thing is, there is not a single ad extension that we can say is applicable for every campaign. However, if you are not taking advantage of these different extensions, then you are missing out on a significant advantage. With ad extensions, you are increasing the size of your ads and allowing them to be more relevant to the keywords you are targeting.
Thus, you need to find the right combination of extensions for your ads to get their full potential. One of the ad extensions that you can add is the Sitelink ad extension. This will give you extra text that displays when your ad appears in the top three positions in the search engine. The ads also look pretty similar to those of organic search sites that appear when you are looking for a company name on the search engine.
With the Sitelink description ad extension, you can add two extra lines of text under each Sitelink heading. Through extensive research, it has been shown that with these two extensions, the ads can capture more click-through rates.
3. Utilise Smart Bidding Strategies
With the rise of automation, Google Ads has also embraced its usage by providing users with smart bidding strategies. The main advantage of this bidding system is that Google will automate when your ads appear, meaning they will enter your ads into the auction only when they are more likely to get a click from a user. This gives your ads more precise, targeted auctions and higher click-through rates. These smart biddings are now adequately developed, and when you use them correctly, they could drastically improve your ads’ performance.
These bidding strategies use machine learning to adjust the bids according to your keywords in every auction. Because these auctions are distinct from one another, it is impossible to make changes to them manually. Besides this, it will save you a lot of time as you don’t have to go through each of the keywords to manually bid on them and adjust them according to your requirements.
4. Take your Chances on Different Ad Types
Don’t stick with the same ad type that worked for you on the first try. Various types of ads could increase your click-through rate. You can go with responsive text ads, allowing users to input three headline fields and two description fields in the expanded search ads. This will increase your chances of showing more relevant ads based on the queries people search for online. There is an ad strength box above the previews that will suggest the different ways you can improve your ads, and it will be updated every time you make changes to your ad. If you keep an eye on the ad strength, it will assist you in creating better-quality ads.
5. Write A Compelling Ad Copy
One of the most important things you need to do is write compelling ad copy for your campaign. The copy needs to stand out and connect with the viewers on an emotional level. Apart from this, your ad copy must be unique; it should not be interchangeable with your competition, as it will only make your CTR suffer more. You can start by writing down your business’s unique selling point (USP). Why do people need to give you a chance instead of your competitors? What are you offering that is not available to your competitors? You need to keep these USPs in mind while writing the ad copy and see how they will influence your CTR.
Wrapping Up
Thus, the click-through rate is not like any other generic area of online marketing; it is all about this. It might reveal your target audience’s interests and what they expect from your website. You may learn what is crucial for your company and website by using the CTR. To get the most out of your PPC campaign expenditure, you need to pay attention to, learn from, and even act upon the metrics and outcomes displayed in the CTR.
The better you connect with your audience, the more clicks you will be able to acquire online, and in the end, they will lead to better sales conversion rates for your business. At the start of the article, we said CTR is the most important metric of your online marketing campaign, and if that quote does not convince you at the start, we hope you have a change of mind after reading this article. If there is anything more you need to know about or something you believe we missed out on while explaining the click-through rate. Make sure to write us down in the comment section, and we will provide you with sufficient answers to your questions. Till then, happy learning!
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Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
