Kyle Sulerud - October 24, 2019If you’re unfamiliar with CTR, I talked about it in my previous blog post.
Before anything else, let me say that simply improving your clickthrough rate is not necessarily the best goal to have with a campaign. There are times when improving your CTR can actually hurt your campaign.
Why?
Because you can actually create ads that attract more clicks. More people are going to click on your ads, but at the same time, the extra people who are clicking on the ad were never to become a customer to begin with, so it’s actually going to hurt your campaign results.
For example, you have an ad that’s getting 5% CTR, and 1 out of 5 of those people are becoming a customer. You make some changes (e.g. different words to attract more clicks), you’re able to increase that ad to 10% CTR. Now you have, let’s say, 10 out of 100 people clicking the ad, instead of just 5 people. But, hypothetically, you still have one customer. So now, instead of converting 1 out of 5 people to become your customer, you’re now converting 1 out of 10 people.
In that case, what you’ve effectively done is increase traffic from non-customers. This has then caused you to spend more money because you’re paying for clicks. You’re literally spending twice as much without improving your conversion, and now you’re in a worse position than before.
So simply improving your CTR is not always the best goal. In fact, if you’re comparing ads, just comparing the CTR is not the thing to look at. You can have an ad with a higher CTR that’s getting worse results than an ad with a lower CTR. You’re paying more per customer with a higher CTR ad and the reason could be is that the ad is attracting more non-customers.
So how can you improve your CTR?
Improving CTR is about improving campaign performance in general.
1) Increasing clicks
You do this by improving your ads. To improve ads, you test them against one another. Start with one ad that’s hopefully working for you. You set up a split test by adding another ad, and you see which ad performs better. You don’t declare the winner based on the CTR. Look at the cost-per-conversion and the profitability of each ad.
For example, you have 2 ads and both ads are giving good ROAS (return on ad spend). Both ads are giving the same conversions, but one of them has a higher CTR. In this case, the ad with the higher CTR is the winning ad. Now the goal is to create an ad that can outperform this winning ad. That’s how you would increase clicks on your ads.
2) Decreasing your ad’s impressions
You can also increase your CTR, not necessarily by increasing clicks, but by decreasing impressions. If you have 5 out 100 people clicking on an ad, that’s a 5% CTR.
If we cut the 50 out of those 100 people, by preventing the other 50 from seeing your ad, (and let’s say you still get the same 5 clicks), now the CTR has increased to 10%.
Decreasing impressions is just a matter of decreasing traffic that is irrelevant. We do this by:
- Adding negative keywords
- Removing some broad match keywords in our account and replacing them with modified or phrase match keywords
- Excluding certain audiences
- Excluding certain locations if we find that they are not becoming customers
Summary:
These are the things that you have to consider to ensure that the account is getting good performance. It’s not just about CTR. The CTR is more of a byproduct of the things that you’re doing which lead to more profitability.
If you’ll exclude keywords and audiences that are not buying from us, that means you’re spending more money on people who have a greater potential of buying from you. That’s going to increase both CTR and, more importantly, your profitability.