What is Click-Through Rate? How do You Improve It?
One of the downsides of running online ads is that you can easily spend a lot of money without getting results. If your ads are not an excellent match for the customer’s needs, then there are likely to be fewer people clicking on them.
Or, even if they do click on your ad, they may not find what they are looking for on your website or landing page.
One metric that can help improve the number of conversions you get is improving your Click Through Rate.
What is Click-Through Rate?
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a calculation of how many people clicked on an ad (clicks) divided by the number of times the ad was shown (also known as impressions).
According to Wordstream, a high CTR correlates with a higher conversion rate for most campaigns.
This is because if people are clicking on your ad, it’s likely that something is engaging.
Improve Quality Score
Quality Score is a metric tracked in Google Ads that give each keyword in your account a score from 0 to 10.
In a sense, it’s a measure of the relevance and quality of your advertising. The Google Ads algorithm predicts the likelihood that someone will click on your ad and assesses the experience they will have on your site.
Google Ads with higher Quality Scores achieve more top rankings, and they cost the advertiser less per click. A higher Quality Score also means they have a more prominent position on the page. Here is Google’s guide to Quality Score.
Many factors influence your Quality Score, including:
- the relevance of your landing pages to the topicality of your ad copy
- displaying the page keyword in your ad headlines,
- linking your ad copy to website text and the ad URL
It’s tempting to find hacks or short-term solutions to force the quality score number up. However, it is better to focus on improving your user experience.
Use Google Ad Extensions
Currently, there are around ten types of ad extensions. While not all of them apply to every campaign you’ll run, it’s wise to try to use them.
Using the Google Ad Callout extensions increases the size of your ads and makes them appear more relevant, and improves the click-through rate.
Here are some of the most commonly used callout extensions for Google Ads:
Sitelink extensions: an extra line of text that displays when your adverts appear in the top three positions.
Call extensions: adds a phone number call extensions to your adverts makes it easier for people to get in touch.
Promotion extensions: allows you to highlight special offers or deals, which displays below your ad.
Price extensions: provides additional links in your advertisement that will take users directly to a specific product page.
Test Different Ad Types
It’s also essential to test out different types of ads that are available. Responsive text ads have the added advantage of using more than just the three headline fields and two description fields in expanded search ads. This increases your chances of showing a more relevant advertisement for each search.
With the rise of mobile searches, Google ads have also released new Google discovery ads for mobile-specific browsing.
As a rule, pay close attention to the ad previews as you create these; if a particular headline doesn’t look right in the Headline 1 position, you can pin it to only show in second or third position. If you only want a specific headline to show in the Headline 1 position, you can pin it to the 1st position.
The ad strength box above the previews also suggests ways for you to improve your ad, and this updates every time you make changes to the ad. This will help you create better quality, more visually appealing ad.
Click-Through Rate is Just The Start
Remember, CTR is a measure of how many people clicked on your ad. It does not reflect the conversion rate on your landing page. Those metrics are better measured as the number of people who completed a form or contacted your sales team.
The Click-Through Rate can tell you how appealing your ad is by how many clicks it generates. However, the larger goal is to aim for conversions, not just viewers.
Click-Through Rate is a piece of the puzzle, and when combined with Conversion-Rate Optimization, you can expect to see a boost in leads and sales.
