The goal of creating great ads, whether you’re using a banner generator or designing them in any other way, is to have a high click-through rate. You want to make sure your ads get attention and drive people to take action. Otherwise, you’re not going to see the ROI you hope for.
With that in mind, below is a guide to understanding your click-through rate and steps you can take to improve it.
Understanding Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate, or CTR, is a major metric in digital marketing. This metric measures the number of clicks an advertiser receives on an ad per number of impressions. Your click-through rate affects your Quality Score and also what you pay when someone clicks your search ad.
The number for CTR is the percentage of people who view your ad and then actually go to click the ad. The people who view your ad are impressions.
The formula to calculate your rate is total clicks on an ad/total impressions=CTR.
You can see the click-through rate if you’re currently running ads by accessing the PPC dashboard.
Google Ads and other platforms offer discounts on pricing for ads that have high relevance. That means these are ads that are meeting the needs of people searching. One way to achieve this is to have a higher Quality Score with your rates of click-throughs.
If you have a higher Quality Score, you can then keep your ad position or improve it for a lower cost.
Also, when you’re advertising on relevant searches when you have an optimal CTR, you’re driving the most people to whatever it is that you’re offering.
There’s debate over what’s considered a good Click-Through Rate. Statistically, it can depend. They’re going to vary depending on the campaign and also between keywords. Industry averages vary, so there are a lot of factors that are going to determine a so-called good rate.
There are times when CTRs can be bad for you. If a keyword isn’t relevant to your business or is unlikely to generate leads or sales, then a high click-through rate for it is negative. You’re paying for each click, and you’re generating a lot of ad spend. You might also be getting clicks on keywords that are expensive, so even if they were to convert, it wouldn’t lead to a profit for you.
You want to focus on getting a high CTR for keywords that are relevant and affordable.
A CTR is different from the conversion rate, which is a metric that shows how many website and app visitors complete an action out of the total number of visitors.
Below, we talk about specific strategies to improve your CTR.
Improving Your Quality Score
Your Quality Score, as mentioned, is a metric tracked in Google Ads. This score gives every keyword that’s part of your account a score from 0 to 10. The Quality Score measures the quality and relevance of your advertising. You can also consider the likelihood Google thinks someone will click on your ad, as well as an assessment of the experience they’ll get if they go to your site.
Starting with Quality Scores is the most important thing you can do to improve your CTR.
When your ad has a higher Quality Score, you’re going to pay less for each click, and you’re going to have higher rankings. You’re also going to have a higher CTR because you’ll secure a more prominent page position.
Use Smart Bidding
Google Ads has smart bidding automated strategies. The good thing about this is that Google automates when ads appear, and they’re only going to enter you in auctions where it appears you’re most likely to get a click.
Going with more targeted audiences will help boost your click-through rate.
Experiment with Different Types of Ads
Responsive ads are one of the best ways to increase your CTR when it comes to design concepts.
A responsive ad can use more than just three headline fields and two description fields. That means you’re more likely to show a relevant ad for a well-matched search.
When you’re creating responsive ads, make sure you’re looking closely at the previews.
Optimize Headlines
Along with images, headlines are what’s going to predominantly catch the attention of people on websites. If you don’t have a well-written headline that encourages them to click, it’s problematic.
When you’re writing headlines, aim to have an emotional impact.
There are some great tools that will analyze your headlines as well to help you make sure that what you’re creating is engaging and also has an emotionally-driven element to it.
Along with your headline, the rest of your ad copy has to be effective and in tune with your targeted audience. You need to speak in a way that resonates with the people you’re targeting. There are going to be things they prioritize and also things they don’t care about at all, so consider yourself speaking directly to them when you write ad copy.
Use Negative Keywords
Negative keywords prevent your ads from being displayed for relevant searches. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to identify negative keywords that will have a detrimental effect on your CTR.
Negative keywords can help make sure you’re not showing to ads that are looking for something unrelated to what you offer.
You can assign negative keywords at different levels, including account, the campaign, or the ad group.
There are different types of negative keywords as well.
When you use negative keywords, along with improving your CTR, you can create relevant ad groups, and it’s going to help you save money and improve your conversion rate.
Split Test
Finally, to optimize all aspects of your ads, you should be running experiments for your campaigns.
A split test is one such experience where you create variations on the ad copy. You should aim to do split testing on two to three ads in every ad group.
When you create variations of the ads, you can figure out which ones are getting the biggest share of clicks.
After running them for an adequate amount of time, you can pause your poor performers and then move the top performers ahead to compare with other ads.
