AdWords – What is CTR?

All about click-through rates

In AdWords, CTR stands for click-through-rate and it refers to the number of people clicking on your link or ad.

What is click-through rate (CTR)?

If you’re running an Adwords campaign your ad might display hundreds, even thousands of times. The CTR refers to the number of times people clicked on the link as a percentage related to the number of impressions or views. So if your ad has been displayed 1000 times and it is clicked on 50 times, that’s a CTR of 5%.

How is CTR calculated?

If you’re wondering how to calculate your CTR, it’s a case of working out percentages.
(Total clicks divided by total views or impressions) multiplied by 100 = CTR (Click-through-rate)
So if you had 1000 views and 45 clicks that would be:
45/1000=0.45 * 100 = 4.5%

What is a good CTR?

For Google Ads, a good CTR or bad CTR depends heavily on your industry and where your ad is displayed. In general Google Search Ads, if you’re seeing a click-through rate above 1.35% in search engine results, you’re doing relatively OK.

CTR & Quality Score – Optimisation

Google uses Quality Score as a way to target results to the audience correctly and to assess the cost of your search engine result.

Quality Score is based on several things, including:

• Your CTR
• The relevance of keywords and content to the target group
• The user experience of your website or web landing page
• Your advert text
• Plus, the historical performance of your ads or content in the past

By carefully creating high-quality landing pages, optimising your keywords and search terms and making  your website is user friendly, you stand the best chance of landing a top spot on Google.

How to increase the CTR

When it comes to ads, improving your CTR is normally a case of optimising the content in the text.

Research your keywords correctly including using long-tail keywords within your website text. Think like the buyer and try working out what people are looking for, or the problem they are looking to solve.

Incorporate the keywords into the title and also apply these to the body of the text. Using more long-tail search terms and including a call to action (CTA) which engages the buyer is the best approach.

Improving CTR can also come from creating a sense of, such as limited time only or be quick offer ends soon.

Remember, peoples attention online is shorter than ever, so grab them with bold simple headlines, make the description relevant as well as to complement the headline and you will be well on the way to increasing your CTR.

Check out our article on ‘How to get the best from Google AdWords‘ or how we can help you with our AdWords Management Melbourne services.