How to Utilize Click Through Rate (CTR) on Google AdWords

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a metric used by advertisers to determine how many clicks are being driven to a landing page. Mathematically, it takes the clicks divided by the impressions to ultimately give you a percentage. 

Benchmarks for Click-Through rates normally vary by industry. In my experience the average benchmark for CTR is around 1.8% for text ads and display ads are much lower. Historically, a majority of my campaigns have been over 2%. So how do I tend to get higher CTR’s in paid search campaigns? Well that’s what this content piece is about.

I will go over the methodology behind building a campaign and how to optimize and improve your campaign through examples that worked for me in the past.

The Methodology

Starting off with the methodology; when building a campaign you have to build it with the end in mind. What do you want your consumer to do? Do you just want to drive traffic to a website? What is the purpose of having paid ads? An analogy I once heard Earl Nightingale say was “If a ship leaves the harbor without a plan or destination, it will surely end up smashed against some rocks as a derelict.” All of this to say, have a plan and stick to that course. In my example below the main focus was driving traffic to a website.

In addition to building a campaign with the end in mind, another key takeaway is to put yourself in the shoes of your consumer. What do they think? How would they utilize their search query? How can your product or service meet their wants and needs? I feel that most marketers sometimes get caught up in the hustle of direct response and being too salesy. I know because I have fallen into that trap before. The best advice I can give would be to put yourself in the consumer’s shoes and start thinking like they think. This can easily be done through online forums or through social media platforms or any other research that’s out there. In the age of the internet resources are plentiful.

I’ll get into more successful methodologies in other pieces, but for now let’s move on.

Google has 3 categories in order to determine how great an ad is. The first is Bid Amount. This is the amount a bid you have allocated for certain keywords. Usually the higher the bid the more likely your ad is to show above others. The second factor is Ad Relevance. How Relevant is your ad to the user’s search? This is where the copy of the ad can prove beneficial. The last factor Google takes into consideration is the landing page experience. Is it valuable in the user’s search? Is it informational? This is normally where we can see how a user responds to the landing page and website. Pro tip: having a mobile friendly landing page would go above and beyond other advertisers and can reduce cost and increase CTR for your campaigns.

Now that we have an understanding of how Google looks at ads, let’s explore the campaigns.

Campaigns

Once a campaign is created Google normally has a week long window where the algorithm is testing out what works and what doesn’t work. After the week there should be a more consistent data stream coming in. After about 2 weeks I know that the data I am seeing  is pretty consistent. This is where I look at CTR among other metrics. There are one of two ways where CTR can perform.

• If it is above the benchmark of 2%, I know to look at other metrics and explore different options there.

• If the CTR is lower than 2%, then that lets me know that there’s something that needs to be done.

Remember how I talked about the 3 factors Google considers for ads? Well here is where that information comes into play.

Usually with low CTR it lets me know that the ad isn’t engaging enough and I can consider that CTR has nothing to do with bids, so I can toss out the landing page experience and the bid factor here. That leaves me with 1 option. Ad relevance. The go-to to help increase CTR lies within ad copy and other extensions. I’ll divulge more through my past example.

Optimization Example

This was towards the beginning of 2020. I just got access to this new client’s account and began exploring the account. In marketing we call this QA-ing. After I was done analyzing the account I noticed that CTR was pretty low and that impressions were low as well. So I decided to explore the ad copy. There I found that the client wasn’t utilizing any ad extensions. That was the first optimization I would make. The second was seeing that impressions were extremely low, so after some digging found out that the client was using low volume long-tail keywords. This was limiting the traffic. The last thing I noticed was that the ad copy was performing poorly. So I got to work.

The first thing I did was create and implement ad extensions that mimicked the website layout. I added sitelink extensions and callout extensions. Historically, I have found that ads that have ad extensions tend to outperform ads without extensions. Once that was done, I moved on to my second task.

Considering the fact that the keywords currently being used were generating some traffic, but still not generating a lot of traffic for the budget allocated, I decided to go broader on the keywords. I proceeded to add in several broader key terms across all of the campaigns that I found through the keyword planner. These brader terms added in additional search volume into the ad. I also explored the Search Query Report (SQR) to see if there were any other opportunities. Once that was done I moved on to my final task…. The copy.

Now depending on the client copy, creation can be a walk in the park where you can just create ad copy and launch it, but a majority of the time the copy has to go through an approval process. So in this case I created a total of 9 new headlines and 6 new descriptions for the ad. General rule of thumb is you want to have 3 ads per ad group. Another best practice is to have 3 headlines and 2 descriptions in every ad. The last thing I did when creating ad copy was to create Responsive Search Ads (RSA). RSA’s pretty much get the lines of copy you put in and move them around to determine which grouping is successful. This automates testing out different ways to place ad copy lines into an ad. 

After the optimizations were made I waited to see the results. Usually you can see the results around a week after any significant changes.

Results

The ending results to the above optimizations were pretty drastic. 

Within a month the CTR doubled, impressions increased significantly, and Cost Per Click (CPC) was reduced by 35%. This meant our ads were getting double the engagement at a fraction of the cost. 

Once I saw those results I knew that those things I looked into were causing this particular campaign to be stagnant. Once I released those obstacles it was like a flood gate opened onto the campaign. This is why I enjoy marketing. Being able to see something, see an opportunity, and make the necessary shifts to produce results.

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