Click Through Rate Explained

by | Apr 9, 2013 | Pay per Click

If you are involved in running an Adwords campaign or hireOrlando Internet Marketing gurus from Get The Clicks to handle your campaigns, then the term “Click Through Rate” (CTR) is nothing you haven’t heard before. But for those of you out there who are curious on what it means and how it works, then this blog is for you!

The Click Through rate literally describes the percentage of web surfers who not only viewed your ad, but actually clicked on it. This is an important factor to analyze for any campaign as it gives you insights into how engaging your ad was and which ads are better in comparison others in that same campaign.

Say for example, you have two ads on the same service, but ad A has a strong call to action and ad B has a special it is promoting. Which ad performed better? This is where CTR will help you decide which was best.

Let us say that each ad was viewed 100 times. Ad A was clicked on 10 times (10% CTR) , while ad B was clicked 33 times (33% CTR).  It would be easy to see by comparing percentages that ad B was the biggest lead generator in essence.

The higher the click through rate, the more powerful your ad, but there are limits. If an ad’s ctr is very high, it can also be a sign of an ad that is reaching too broad an audience who will probably not convert into actual paying customers!

An example of this would be an ad that promotes “haircuts”. Are these haircuts for dogs, or human? While that ad might receive a monumental amount of impressions it is highly unlikely that it would convert, especially on a local level.

The important tips to note on CTR are the following:

•    Search engines use CTR when figuring out which ads to rank higher. The ad with the higher CTR tends to rank better and can even be rewarded with a lower cost per click.

•    CTR depends heavily on the ad position. The higher you can push your ad, the stronger the click through rate.

•    The best ads almost always have the keywords in the headline. Sometimes keywords are too long for the strict character limits in the ads so they must be placed on the second line, but in general the ads with keywords in the headline perform better.

•    CTR values can range from 1%-over 20%. No standard number exists to what percentage is “best”.

We hope you enjoyed this explanation of CTR, and feel more confident and prepared when discussing Adword performance with your campaign manager. To learn more about Adwords, please subscribe to our Get The Clicks blog to stay up to speed on all things OrlandoInternet Marketing related.

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