Why CTR is so Important to Your Google Ads Performance

When it comes to getting instant visibility for your new business website design, very few methods equal Google Ads for speed and convenience. Running a PPC campaign does take skill and know-how though – fortunately, Google offers a wealth of data which helps you get things right. In this post, we’re going to look at one of the most important metrics; CTR. This stands for click through rate and matters because this tells you how search users are clicking on your ads and arriving on your business website.

Your CTR or Click Through Rate, is an indication of how often your ad is clicked on versus the amount of times it is displayed. This is reported as a percentage. For example, if for every ten people who saw your ad on Google, one person clicked through, you would see a CTR of 10%. Click through is a key indicator that your ad is attractive to searchers. This is why you are given an individual CTR for separate ad groups. You’ll get a CTR figure for each keyword – which tells you which keywords are performing best when it comes to sending traffic to your site.The reason this is important is that as you progress your Ads account and you expand your keyword list, you’ll find that you are bidding on keywords that are not as closely linked to your business as others. You may even be bidding on competitor keywords. Search engines want your billions of PPC advertising spend, but they are also trying to promote the best possible experience for the user. As such, they put an emphasis on showing ads that are more likely to be clicked on. They make more money and clearly the user has seen a relevance between their search and your ad.It is for this reason that your CTR is such a strong factor when determining your quality score. If you play in this space, you need to be willing to pay for it through considerably higher CPCs (cost per click). No one wants to pay more than they should for their clicks, so what can you do to impact your CTR and ultimately your CPCs? Ad relevance – The quality of your advert and its relevance to the keyword are essential. This can actually impact your quality score directly on its own, but it also has huge impact on the user’s decision to click or not click. Ensure your ad copy references the main keywords of the search query as well as conveying an enticing message for the user. Landing Page – This will also directly impact your quality score as well as your CTR. Make sure you are choosing the most specific landing page you have available on your site for each keyword. Ideally, you want to take the user immediately to the page which best responds to their search needs.If your site is an ecommerce one, you should always strive to send users directly to the product page which most closely matches their search query. No one likes to click more than they have to, we humans are lazy and it’s too much like hard work. Plus, don’t forget that Google and other search engines check the landing page for relevancy. So, your landing pages should have the usual SEO factors in place, titles, web copy etc to continue to reinforce the relevancy of your search result. Your Overall Website SEO – Having your website’s SEO in order is always going to play a role in how search engines treat you on paid advertising as well as organic. This changes engine to engine of course and it’s not going to save your CTR on its own, but it will impact quality score and relevancy in the eyes of the engines enough to help you get more clicks for less. And that means more traffic to your site for less money!