As PPC advertisers we desire to have a higher click through rate on our ad campaigns… which’s natural to us.
As you may already know, click-through rate is measured by the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions your ad campaign is getting.
As creative as we try to be, we tend to tweak and test our ad copies, publishing several variants of our ads to analyze and understand which copy performs the best for our marketing campaigns.
This way we would know what works best for us, and double down on those ads to improve and push our ad click-through rates higher!
“What is your click-through rate?” “ How well do you convert?” Am sure you have heard this phrase several times throughout your career in advertising.
It may be from your clients to your work buddies, or even your competitors who are the disguise of your friend ;)
While we marketers strive to achieve a higher click-through rate, we also want to make sure that that is balanced out with a healthy percentage of those clicks converted to leads.
In our previous articles posted, Mora, our PPC analyst, looks at a few scenarios of when CTRs on Display ads can be so high, but conversions remain the same.
Factors such as Click bait, misleading ads, offers that are too good and Ad Fraud were a few ways Mora goes on to explain how this might show a high click-through rate but fewer conversions…
In this article, we are not going into the details of it, however, if you are interested you can check it out here.
In today’s post let’s talk about a few ways we could look at to improve our CTR Rates and achieve a balanced click to impressions on our campaigns.
- Ad Position
This is an important factor to look at when running ad campaigns as it has a direct effect on the number of clicks your ad is getting. Ads that are ranked higher on search engines will have a higher CTR number compared to ads that rank at the bottom.
So it is important to prioritize that positions on your ads are high and that your overall ad ranking is high so you can achieve good CTR on your campaigns.
- Ad relevance
The more relevant your ad campaign is going to be to your target audience the higher click-through rate you are going to get, and that’s a straight-up fact.
Consider adding relevant keywords to your ads, so that users will be more likely to click on the ads when they see their keywords in the ads.
When your target customer sees that your ads are very relevant to what they have been searching for online they are most likely to click through and this will have a positive effect on your click-through rates as well.
- Ad Extensions
Adding Ad extensions will help your ad to stand out in the search results and encourage users to click through to your website.
Having ad extensions will also expand your advertisement to make it more informative and useful to users, thus improving your ad quality which leads to a higher ad rank which in turn results in higher click through rates to your website.
Try to include a few callout extensions for site links, callouts, and structured snippets to improve the quality of your ads.
- Optimize your campaigns for mobile devices
If you are already in the PPC advertising field you should know by now the importance of having an ad campaign that is optimized for mobile users.
It is predicted that by 2022, mobile will account for 77.2 % of all digital ad spend.
So if your click-through rates are not what you expected them to be, maybe you should look into your campaigns to see if your ads are optimized to display mobile
If not, then my friend you’ve got some work to do…
- Placing Higher bids
Bids are an important factor to rank your ad higher in search engines.
Use a combination of Automated and Manual ad bid strategy to increase maximize your keywords to rank higher
As higher positioned ads lead to higher click through rates, you should aim to bid higher so that your ad will be placed in a higher position and have an increased click-through rate.
- Optimizing search terms
As certain keywords bring in multiple searches to your ads, there is a chance where all of these searches won’t be relevant to your ad, you can view their individual click-through rates through the search terms report.
If you can notice that some of the search terms have a higher number of impressions and just a few clicks, you may want to consider either removing or changing the keywords to improve your click through rates for that campaign.
Final Thoughts
Having higher click through rates does not have to mean it is the best indicator for ad success, however, it is still important to get a decent click-through rate on your ad campaigns to lead you to success…
When looking to improve the conversions of your ads, it is by now known that good design and copy are just not enough.
Start getting creative with your ads and include a few innovative features, relevance, and placement to see a change in your conversions.
As always, keep testing and tweaking folks!
Let us know your thoughts on the above points! We would love to hear it…
