Click-Through Rate (CTR) represents the number of clicks received divided by the number of impressions received.

Your CTR helps indicate:

  1. How helpful and relevant your ads are.
  2. How successful your targeting/keywords are.

Improving your CTR can increase your ad rank – meaning:

  1. Increased impression share. This essentially means that your ads have more visibility – with a bigger portion of the impressions that they are eligible to receive.
  2. An increase in visibility can lead to increased site visits.
  3. Potentially lower cost per clicks (CPCs) for a better position.
  4. Potentially higher conversion rates (CR). CR depends on many factors but in theory:
    – An informative ad means a higher proportion of users will click your ad (increased CTR)
    – With more information at their fingertips, they are more qualified to make a decision about purchasing your product or service after they’ve clicked your ad.

Here are some simple steps to improving your CTR and your overall campaign performance:

1. Include the keyword in the ad copy

Keeping your ad relevant to the users’ search term increases the chance of being clicked.

2. Include a strong call to action to encourage users to take action

For example ‘buy now’, ‘contact us for a quote today’ or ‘sign up now for a free sample’.

3. Change match type

Even after the recent update to exact match, CTR’s are much higher on exact match keywords as the queries that can trigger adverts are very closely linked to the keyword.

Reviewing our client data from the past 12 months, CTR on exact match keywords was on average 105% higher than broad match terms, and conversion rate was 138% higher.

Remember that it’s still important to have a balance of match types (including broad and phrase) to maintain a healthy volume of impressions and clicks.

4. Add negative keywords

Negative keywords enable you to filter out search queries that are less relevant to your keywords.

The broad keyword + red +shoes could trigger an advert for the query “I want to buy red shoes” in addition to “red shoes film”.

Despite being a classic, a search for the 1948 film is very unlikely to result in a click on your ad (never mind a sale), bringing down your CTR.

Adding an extensive list of negative keywords not only improves your CTR by weeding out the irrelevant terms, it also saves you a tonne of budget! When we ran an initial audit for a client recently we found that adding one additional negative keyword saved them over £5000 per month.

5. Provide as much relevant information as possible

Google Ads have recently given us a third headline and a second description – that’s an extra 120 characters to communicate to your potential customers.

Adding ad extensions to your campaigns give users more reason to click on your advert. Taking them to specific, relevant pages via sitelinks or communicating your unique selling points through callout extensions.

Next steps:

If you’d like an in-depth review of your GoogleAds account, call 0161 956 8963 to speak to a paid media expert.