How to Improve CTR

Brand awareness without clicks may be acceptable but if your services and product details are more elaborated on your landing page you must need clicks on your ads. Anyone who is spending time managing campaigns should have an idea about how to analyze and improve CTR.

CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown:

CTR = clicks /impressions.

Once you start getting good CTR next step is to analyze your conversion rate. This shows you how many users visited your landing page, took some actions to get converted, compared to the total number of visits to that page.

Conversion Rate = Total Conversions / Total number of Clicks

The conversion rate gives an idea about the revenue you are generating. If it’s not good you should look to identify the problems and correct them. Page speed and landing page quality are one of the big factors in conversion rate.

What PPC Managers Should Measure in CTR Performance Report

Getting traffic is a major goal for any site owner. When you’re investing in marketing and paid advertising, traffic is an even bigger concern. You can gauge your ad performance by looking at your clickthrough rate (CTR).

This shows you the ratio of clicks your ad received relative to the number of impressions it got. It is calculated with this formula:

Clickthrough Rate = (Total Clicks on Ad) / (Total Impressions)

Having a higher CTR will help your ad attain a better quality score, which can then reduce how much you pay for clicks in your campaign. By the same token, a poor CTR can quickly lead to wasted spend and a drained budget.

Let’s see how the from PPCexpo CTR Performance Report can help you.

Comparing the Most Recent Period with Previous Period

The most effective way of analyzing CTR is to look at the values of the current period with the previous period. That way, you can identify patterns, which will provide insights you can use to adjust your campaign efforts.

For example, perhaps your ad is doing well on desktop but CTR is underperforming on mobile. This could mean:

1. Your ad displays better on desktop compared to mobile devices.
2. Perhaps your keyword bids are lower on mobile or there is more competition on mobile.
3. Your product may be more appealing to desktop users.

In the same way that you compare devices, you can compare by Match Type, Geo, Keywords, Day of the week and Hour of the Day to find interesting patterns in your data.

Let’s look at these in more detail.

1. CTR Performance by Targeting

When you target the right audience, you increase the chances of acquiring leads that will convert. Comparing the present CTR data with the past can be done in the following ways:

• Geographical Performance Analysis: Where are your clicks coming from? The deeper analysis here will allow marketers to eliminate low-performing areas, and invest their resources on driving relevant traffic from areas that are already showing promise.
• Device-Based Analysis: A call-only campaign should have a greater focus on mobile devices, while desktop could largely be ignored.
• Peak Hours (Time of Day) Analysis: There may be certain points of the day that see a surge in traffic. Schedule your ad to display at those times so you can maximize your return on advertising spend (ROAS).
• Days of Week (DoW) analysis: This report also enables comparative analysis by weekdays. Your audience may be more active online on some days, and you can adjust your ads accordingly.

2. CTR Performance by Engagements

Audience engagement is vital in advertising – if people don’t find your ads interesting, it’s bad news! By linking your Ads Account with Google Analytics, you can view the following key engagement metrics:

• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of site visitors who immediately leave after viewing just one page. A high bounce rate is bad for CTR, whereas a low bounce rate is will help your CTR, and ultimately, help you gain better-quality traffic.
• Page Views: This is relative to individual keywords. Having a healthy page view metric is a sign of good quality traffic.
• Session Duration: How long do people stay on your site? Ideally, you want them to stay longer and visit several pages. That’s an indication of good quality traffic and relevant content.

3. CTR Performance by Keywords and Search terms

Your CTR metric can be affected by your keyword choices. It’s important that you bid on the right keywords, and use search terms that are aligned with user intent. That way, you’re more likely to find a good balance of reach and relevance.

Consider the following:

• High CTR keywords with a low ad position may need to have their bids increased.
• Low CTR keywords that have a high ad position may be a candidate for a bid decrease or pause.
• Search terms with a high expected CTR may be worth adding to your keyword list.
• Search terms will a low expected CTR may be worth adding to your negative keywords list.

You can use keyword research tools to find relevant search terms with decent monthly search volume, and then you will be able to determine if they are worth targeting or avoiding.

With your campaign goals in mind, consider the CTR performance of keywords in conjunction with keyword match types to identify the pairings that work well for your campaign.

4. CTR performance by Ad Position

Ad Position is a tricky one in Google Ads. If your ad position is #1, and it’s generating a high clickthrough rate, it may be okay to keep your bids as they are. However, you should also think about cost-per-click (CPC) – are you paying too much to be in the top spot?

This will have an impact on your return on investment (ROI), and so you may need to weigh up the importance of being in top position against your bottom line.

To learn more about this relationship, read our blog on CTR and Ad Position.

Reveal the Road to Success with the CTR Performance Report

To have any hope of succeeding with PPC advertising, you must track your CTR and consider how it is affecting the traffic coming to your website.

The PPCexpo Performance Report provides marketers with the key insights they need on viewer behaviors and allows you to understand related metrics such as Ad Position, Bounce Rate, and Page Views.

Further to that, it can help you identify trends in keywords, and it the times and days of the week that your ad is being displayed. By comparing historical data with the present, you will be able to answer a lot of questions, including:

1. What is your account CTR or campaign average CTR? How has CTR changed since the previous period?
2. How is CTR impact its primary components (Quality Score and Average CPC) over time?
3. Which day of the week contributes most to CTR? Which hour of the day is the peak for clicks?
4. Which devices contribute most and how were the same devices performing in the previous period?
5. Which ad position contributes most to CTR and what was its status in the previous period?
6. Which search terms contribute most to CTR?

Plus many other mysteries will be revealed. So, what are you waiting for? Put the PPCexpo CTR Performance Report to work for your business today.