7 Tips To Improve Google Ads (AdWords) CTR

 

Improving your AdWords Click Through Rate (CTR) has a number of benefits, including:

 

1. Increases traffic volumes – when more people click your ads you then have more visitors which has many benefits
2. Increases conversions – with more visitors you then get more sales and leads because you have more potential customers
3. Improves quality scores – this is one of the three quality score factors and when you improve AdWords CTR, your scores increase too
4. Higher Ad Rank – your Ads are rewarded with higher positions when they are relevant to searches

 

Achieving a good CTR should be every advertisers goal. You should continue to work on your targeting, ads, keywords, search terms, bids, positions and more to improve the click through rates.

 

 

Follow these tips to improve your AdWords CTR:

 

Gain Top Positions
A top position on Google is a placement in one of the top 4 positions in the auction results. Ads that are at the top get significantly higher CTRs than those at the bottom – below the Organic results.

 

There are two main ways to gain top positions on Google: Increase your bids and improve Ad quality. Improving Ad quality takes longer. You have to work on Ad Relevance and ensure that keywords are tightly themed in the ad groups and related to the text ads.

 

Increasing bids is a lot quicker. You can increase bids manually if you’re using a manual bid strategy or use an automated strategy to outrank competitors.

 

An effective bid strategy to outbid a competitor is Target Outranking Share. You can pick a competitor that ranks higher and appears at the top and use a Target Outranking Share strategy as the screen shot below shows

 

 

And you can choose to outrank them all the time by adding 100% in the ‘Target to outrank’ section. Remember to put a maximum bid limit because this can quickly get expensive if they are doing the same.

 

Remove Low CTR Keywords
Check your campaigns for keywords with low CTRs. If your target is to have a minimum of 5% CTR and some are as low as 1% or lower and with poor performance for conversions too, then you should remove them.

 

Trying to improve these won’t help. It will waste time which you could use to focus on better performing keywords.

 

Remove Low CTR Search Terms
Check the search terms report to look for low performing searches. If they have low CTRs and conversions are low too, then you can remove them by adding them as negative keywords.

 

It’s not surprising to find search terms with CTRs as high as 100%. That’s because Search terms tend to be much higher in number than your keywords. People search in all kinds of ways and one keyword can trigger hundreds of search terms.

 

Many of these will have high CTRs. However, some will have low CTRs and these you can remove. Doing so will help to improve keyword click through rates and overall performance.

 

Remove Low CTR Ads
Each of your Ad groups should have between 3-5 Ads for testing purposes. When the ad group is active, you’ll see the click through rate for each ad and over time you’ll see the best and least performing ones.

 

You can replace low performing Ads with better performing ones

 

Add Ad Extensions
Ad extensions give your Ads more prominence in the search results. Adding many ad extensions helps to push your ads to the top as they become more relevant to searchers.

 

Searchers are then more likely to click through. So try to add as many sitelinks, callout, structured snippet, call, price and location extensions as you can.

 

 

Include Keywords In The Text Ad
Add the keyword in the ad. The best place to add it is in the headline, and Headline 1 in particular. This is the most prominent part of the Ad and the clickable part that takes the visitor to your landing page.

 

People are more likely to click when they see their keyword in the Ad. They’ll perceive the Ad to be relevant to what they need and that they’ll find this on the landing page.

 

Of course each ad group will have multiple keywords. In fact, each ad group should have at least 5 keywords. That then makes it difficult to have every keyword included in the Ad.

 

So the solution is to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This syntax replaces the default text that you add with the searchers keyword (bear in mind it’s the keyword and not the search term that is included).

 

This is what the Dynamic Keyword Insertion syntax looks like:

 

{KeyWord:Default Ad Text}

 

Read more about Dynamic Keyword Insertion here https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/74992?hl=en-GB

 

Make Ads Relevant
The DKI syntax mentioned above is one way to make Ads relevant. Another way is to add key benefits and a unique selling point to entice visitors to click. It also differentiates your ads from competitors’.

 

Many ads in the search results are drowning in a sea of sameness. They look like many others on the page and aren’t differentiated in any way. So searchers click on any they see because there’s nothing to differentiate them.

 

From now on, study what your competitors are promoting. Then look for ways on how to make your Ads different by presenting your benefits and unique selling point.

 

Conclusion
Follow these 7 tips to improve AdWords CTR. This will help to increase clicks to your website and therefore lead to more sales or leads.