Achieving a good click-through rate (CTR) on AdWords advertising is important because it directly affects your Quality Score, and therefore how much you pay for clicks on your ads. This article explains what clickthrough rate means and how you can improve it.

What is click through rate?

Click-through rate image how many people click on your ad when they see it. This will help you determine how effective your ads and keywords are.

It is assumed that a man enters women’s shoes as a Google search phrase and sees an ad for children’s shoes. In this case, the ad and the keyword don’t match well, and the person probably won’t click on your ad. At the same time, he is racking up unnecessary impressions, which will lower his click-through rate.

If we take the second option, where a man enters the search term women’s shoes and sees an ad for women’s shoes. In this case, the person is more likely to click on her ad because the ad matches the search phrase they entered. This way he won’t rack up unnecessary impressions and his CTR will hold up well.

So always make sure your keywords and ads match. The more relevant your keywords are to your ad, the more likely someone is to click your ad when searching for your keyword.

You can calculate your click-through rate by dividing the number of clicks your ad receives by the number of times your ad is shown.

For example: Your ad received 12 clicks and was shown 300 times on Google.

The formula is 12/300 = 0.04, or your click-through rate is 4%.

Why is click-through rate important?

Click-through rate affects the Quality Score of your ads. Achieving high Quality Scores will give your ad better rankings and cheaper clicks.

You can also use your click-through rate to determine which keywords and ads are profitable in your account and what could be better.

What is a good click through rate?

There is no single correct answer for this. Click-through rate depends a lot on the industry, the competitive situation in the industry, the products being advertised, the campaign, etc.

However, in general, a CTR of 0.5% is bad and 5% is good.

How can you improve your click-through rate?

If you think your CTR is low, you can try to improve it by following these steps:

  • Add negative keywords to your campaign: Get more relevance to your keywords and ads when you don’t show your ads on the wrong keywords.
  • Check your search terms report to see how your ads have started to show. Add profitable words to your business from your search terms report and add them to your ads.
  • Make your ad text more engaging, well-written ads will rack up more clicks.
  • Adjust your keyword match types: Stricter match types give you more control over which keywords your ads show.
  • If necessary, increase your keyword bids. This will help your ad appear in better places on Google. In that case, more will probably be clicked.

Where do you see your click through rate?

Each keyword and ad in your account has its own clickthrough rates. Here’s how to find these numbers on your account.

Keyword CTR:

Ad CTR:

Summary

A good click-through rate will save you money, improve your ad rank, and improve your Quality Score. Quality Score is one of the best predictors of success with AdWords advertising.