Improving Adwords CTR

Maximising your Adwords return on investment is a number game. While improving your Click Through Rate (CTR) may not at first appear to be one of the most important aspects, it does play a major part in reducing cost and maximising your Adwords campaigns. Masses of traffic is not the aim of a PPC campaign because it can prove costly and greatly reduce your on-site conversions by bidding too high for very general keywords. On the other hand, though, Adwords favours advertisements that show a high CTR, giving them inflated ad positions and deflated bid prices.

Constant Monitoring And Optimisation

It is vital that you monitor all aspects of a PPC campaign on an ongoing basis. Things can change quickly that result in a good, profitable campaign, quickly becoming costly and worse than worthless. Your Quality Score determines the percentage of the bid price that you need to pay. As well as ensuring that your pages are relevant to the ads you serve, you also need to keep your CTR at a reasonable level. Ad campaigns with a low CTR are considered to have a low quality score and will therefore cost more per click.

Separate Ad Groups And Keywords

Every page should have its own ad campaign. Only group together keywords that are very similar into a single ad to ensure that visitors are highly targeted to the content of the ad and the linked page. This also makes tracking the ads simpler and more intuitive because you will need to determine the keywords that work well and those that do not generate a positive return on investment.

Targeted Keywords

Work through your list of keywords and ensure that they are all highly targeted. The more targeted a keyword, the more interested a person will be when they read your ad copy, and the more likely they will be to click on the ad. If you have already been running an Adwords campaign then you can use the figures from this campaign to determine those keywords that work and those that don't. Remember that there may be other reasons that people aren't clicking on your ads, though, including the ad copy itself.

Negative Keywords

There are likely to be occasions when you don't want an ad to be displayed for a particular search. You may have discovered that when surfers use a particular word in their search, they are less likely to click on your ad. By adding this word as a negative keyword, your ad will not be displayed when this negative keyword is used. Adwords enables campaign level negative keywords as well, so you can ensure that your keyword list is even more targeted and relevant.

Refine Your Ad Copy

The quality and content of your ad copy is obviously important. The more refined the copy, and the more intriguing or positive the content, the more likely surfers will be to click on the ad. While improving your CTR is important, care should be taken to ensure that you don't attract untargeted visitors. This may improve your CTR but it will cost you in bounced clicks.

Improve Ad Placement

Possibly the most obvious tactic is to improve your ad placement. The top positioned ad typically receives the most interest and the highest CTR. Again, though, it is important to balance the increase in CTR against the reduced conversion rate that many have witnessed from gaining the top position.

CTR And Your Adwords Campaign

Return on investment should be the most important figure when looking at your Adwords advertising campaigns. However, your CTR (Click Through Rate) directly impacts this figure, because it is used to determine your quality score and obviously determines how many visitors you receive from each ad. Above are some useful techniques for improving the CTR of an Adwords campaign.