6 Useful Tips To Improve Click Through Rate
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It is one of the most important metrics by which to judge your digital marketing, be they organic SEO campaigns or through paid channels such as pay-per-click (PPC). Click-through rates let you see how many people, after seeing your advert or content, click on the relevant links to pages on your site. These pages could be product pages or service pages and the rate lets you know how many people clicked ‘through’ to something.
Obviously, click-through rates are perfect, they only tell you if someone has visited a link linked to an advert, and they don’t indicate whether or not someone has purchased something or enquired about a service. But, they are an essential part of your wider metric makeup and no campaign reporting is complete without them.
With that importance in mind, here, we’re going to be diving deep into click-through rates (or CTRs as they’re often shortened too) and offering up six important tips about how to improve your campaigns so that your CTRs are where you want them to be.
Here at Embryo, we ensure that all your campaigns are measured by metrics that matter to you, be it click-through rates, cost per acquisition, or bounce rate. To learn more about how we do that, be sure to get in touch with us today by phone at 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].
What Is Click-Through Rate?
Click Through Rate is often referred to as CTR within the digital marketing industry and online advertising. It is the percentage of people who see your ad (impressions) to the people who click the ad on your website (clicks). It is a great success indicator of whether your ads are suitable for your target audience.
The formula for CTR is: Impressions / Clicks = CTR (%)
Each business within an industry has a different value of what is considered a “good” CTR. It will also naturally vary with demand and seasonality. Research can be carried out in order to find an average CTR range within an industry to set sensible targets. This can be done by looking at previous data month on month or even year on year.
Why Is Click-Through Rate Important Within PPC?
Apart from helping evaluate whether ads are useful to a given target audience. CTR is imperative to your account because it is directly linked to your quality score. This is whereby Google rates each ad a score out of 10 based on how relevant the ad is to the term being searched. It is determined by three factors: CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience.
The reason that having a high-quality score is so significant is that it can decrease the amount of money bidding on keywords, allowing more clicks for your money. It also allows us to maintain or improve your position on the ad rank and therefore achieve more visibility.
Below I have gathered 6 useful tips that I have found to help improve CTR.
Six Useful Ways to Boost Your CTR
1. Keep It Relevant
To do this ensure that your campaign, ad groups, keywords and ad copy are all aligned. This direct process from campaign to ad copy shows Google a high level of meaning and an in-depth understanding of what your business offers and whether it is suitable for the searcher.
The best practice for this is to have a separate campaign for every theme of product or service your business offers, then get more granular when getting to ad groups. This can be done by organising keywords into smaller, tightly knitted and more effective ad groups. Not only is this more manageable it also becomes easier to write ads that precisely target its specific audience. This will naturally improve CTR thus improving ad relevance.
A useful tip when writing ad copy is to use the keywords within its ad group directly in the ad. By repeating this back to the searcher, it reassures them that you have exactly what they’re searching for. Meaning that they are more likely to click on the ad.
2. Write Compelling Ad Copy
To write compelling ad copy use clear and concise Call To Action (CTAs) This is a marketing term that uses phrases to encourage a desired action. For example, “call us today” or “book now” tells the searcher exactly what you want them to do and persuades them to do it. Although CTAs are extremely useful it is important not to over-use them as it can have an adverse effect and actually become irritating and sometimes confusing to the searcher.
By including unique selling propositions within your ad copy, can differentiate your ad from the competition. It is important to include the benefits of your products and services, not only the features. A technique that performs well is using statistics and/or promotions, for example, “95% success rate” and “new customers receive 15% off”. This is key to improving CTR as you are essentially grabbing the attention of the reader which means they will be more likely to click.
Another tip is to write as if you are speaking directly to the searcher. This can be done by simply using “you” and “your” where appropriate. This creates a more personable and helpful tone of voice which makes searchers feel important and gives off a friendly and accommodating feel to your business.
Studies have shown that capitalising the first letter of each word within an ad copy can drastically improve CTR. It is said that looks more appealing, professional and trustworthy to Internet users. However, Google can be sensitive to using some words in capitals e.g., FREE and in some cases can disapprove the whole ad.
3. Utilise Character Limits
Google sets a character limit to each segment of an ad. Headlines have a character limit of 30 whereas descriptions have a character limit of 90. By utilising this character limit, it uses every opportunity to get your message out to the viewer. As well as giving Google as much information as possible so they can determine more accurately how relevant the ad is. However, it is not advised to overuse or cram too much information into an ad as it can begin to lose the flow and become overwhelming.
4. Use Of Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are free with Google and give your ads more prominence to get more clicks and more valuable interaction. They’re important because they maximise ads, meaning that they add extra information. This is useful because it is sometimes difficult to get all the information across within the character limit without the ad copy becoming cramped. It also makes ads larger which takes up more space on the ad rank, this is beneficial as it takes searchers more time to scroll past your ads and before they know it, they find themselves reading your ad.
The four most common types of ad extension are:
- Sitelinks are often seen underneath the ad and offer alternative relevant landing pages that the user may find helpful. It is a good idea to try to keep these as action-based links for example “contact us” page which will direct users immediately to a converting page. It is recommended you use 2-4 of these.
- Structured snippets are lists of phrases to grab the attention of the user. They highlight the products and services your business has to offer.
- Call-out extensions are short snips of text that describe the most exciting aspects of your business. They are used to entice the audience, an example of this would be “24 Hour Customer Service” or “Free UK Shipping & Returns”.
- Call extensions are pretty straightforward. It is simply a hyperlink to the company’s phone number. Rather than the user having to click on the website and find a contact number. Searchers can click the call extension and save time and effort which makes it easier for the searcher.
5. Negative Keywords
Downloading a search term query report and regularly adding to negative keyword lists is crucial to optimising any account. This can massively boost CTR as it refines search quality in order to get higher qualified leads. Negative keywords are where you block any irrelevant or non-converting keywords that are using up your spending. This can happen when you use broad match types because it may find a word that is off the mark with what your business sells. Although blocking keywords can sometimes decrease overall clicks and impressions it can improve CTR as the ad is specifically targeted to those it is relevant to.
6. Split Testing Ad Copy
Spilt testing or sometimes referred to as A/B testing is whereby Google allows us to run ad copy experiments within our campaigns. It is important to do this with at least 2-3 ads within the chosen ad group. This means that you can run ads with different elements and you can compare the proportion of clicks and evaluate which performs better. After they have run for a sufficient amount of time, the ads that didn’t perform as well can be paused.
Made to Measure: Improve Your CTA with These Six Tips
I hope that you can understand the purpose CTR has within digital marketing and have found these tips useful. Having a good CTR is crucial to the success of your business and these tips, if performed correctly and regularly can and will boost rates.
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