What Is A Good Click Through Rate (CTR)?

What is a good click through rate?

It’s the age-old question asked by PPC managers and clients alike. Though we can agree that higher is better, much debate remains as to what constitutes a good vs. subpar account CTR. Below, I’ll give a definitive answer, though I acknowledge that many factors are at play. Additionally, I’ll be answering this question only in regards to Google AdWords and Bing Ads.

What Are These Factors?

Network – Search Network text and Google Shopping campaigns will, for the most part, have significantly higher CTRs than Display campaigns, although remarketing campaigns do have the potential for better CTRs than other types of Display campaigns.

Relevance – This factor combines the complete search experience from query to landing page.

Instead of listing them individually, I include bid, keyword match type, negative keywords/audiences, quality score, and ad copy as part of the overall relevance factor. All of these items need to work together in order to yield a higher CTR.

Ad Rank – Even with high relevance throughout, ad position will sometimes be low. Take into consideration both Google Shopping ad units and ad extensions and the prominence of a standard text ad diminishes greatly. Finally, if your ad is below the fold on searcher browsers, you’ll potentially accrue many impressions without the ad ever being seen!

Device – Dovetailing off ad rank, CTR will vary by device. I generally find mobile CTR to be higher than desktop and tablet. However, volume tends to be much lower. Mobile ads will also take up much of the screen, often giving users only paid options before having to scroll.

Data – My general rule of thumb is to have at least 100 impressions on any given campaign, ad group, keyword, or piece of ad copy before optimizing. There are always exceptions, but this threshold is a good baseline, as it gives the specific item a fair chance to succeed.

Vertical – CTRs will vary by vertical, especially when considering competition. For example, “lawyer” related terms are often extremely expensive and have vast search volume. Any of the above factors may be influenced, causing fluctuations in CTR.

So What’s The Verdict?

Based upon these factors, a good account CTR is 2%.

Others would argue that 2% is too low. I’m not advocating that once you hit 2% CTR, you’re in the clear. You should constantly strive to improve CTR in conjunction with your cost per conversion and conversion rate goals. My stance is that with all factors considered in today’s PPC world, a 2% account CTR should be deemed good.

Considerations

When I say a 2% account CTR, there will most likely be individual campaigns with better CTRs and those with worse. For example, your branded and Shopping campaigns may have CTRs much higher than 2%, while others may be below this percentage. In addition, Display Network campaigns will accrue many more impressions at lower CTRs, weighing down the overall account CTR more than search campaigns. With these considerations, my stance remains that a good account CTR is 2%.

Clients will inevitably ask how their CTR compares to others in their vertical. My answer tends to be cautious, as there are no definitive studies comparing CTR across verticals. There are studies, but none with conclusive data that I would be comfortable standing behind.

Using Google’s native tools, we are able to glean competitive data, but these figures are only estimates. The Auction Insights report provides interesting data comparing metrics such as impression share, average position, and overlap rate to your competitors.

Final Thoughts

Both clients and managers will also constantly question how to improve CTR. At the basic level it all comes down to one of the factors outlined above, relevance. Create a well-structured account that easily gives searchers answers to their questions (queries).

You should always be striving to achieve a higher CTR. A 2% CTR is good, but continually improving this metric will make your account great.

http://www.ppchero.com/what-is-a-good-click-through-rate-ctr/

How To Write Headlines That Get Clicks

Every 60 seconds, there are 216,000 Instagram updates, 277,000 tweets, 2,460,000 content shares on Facebook,and hundreds of thousands of other content being shared across other social networks and messaging app.

So how are you going to get your readers to read the article you took hours to research, write, and edit?

Headlines. And it is becoming more important with each new social platform. Being inundated with hundreds, if not thousands, of updates every day, the average person often only skim through their social updates in search of contents that interests them at first sight.

You Decide To Read This Article Because Of Its Headline

Now you see how important headlines are?

8/10 of readers will read your headline, while only 2/10 will read your article. Furthermore, once these people have reached your page, about 38% would bounce off the page even before they read your first paragraph.

So to ensure your article get the attention it deserves, you have to write headlines that make people want to find out more.

And You Were Interested In The Headline Because It Appealed To Your Self-Interest

John Caples mentioned four main important qualities a headline may posses: self-interest, news, curiosity, quick and easy; and ranked self-interest as the most important one of all.

Why is self-interest so important? Because readers are paying to read the article with their time — a precious and limited commodity nowadays. This is especially true since now we need to make ourselves available to at least 2-3 different social media platforms.

In order to appeal to your audience’s self interest, you have to first understand them, their needs, problems, and right down to the words they are most likely to use to address these issues.

Find Out What Appeals To Your Customer’s Self-Interest

Please everyone and you would please no one.

Understand the demographic and behaviour of your most profitable group of customers and start working from there. By focusing yourself on one specific customer, you will be able to find out his or her deepest wants and needs and craft your offer from there.

Find out how your customers word their self-interest: Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Trend

If you did your customer’s persona research, you would most probably have a list of your customer’s pain point, worries, and goals that they wish to achieve.

But knowing your customers’ pain points aren’t enough; you need to understand how they “think”, specifically how they search.

Take a look at this example between “how to generate leads” and “how to generate sales”. Sales and leads are closely related terms, and both leads to the same goal — revenue.

As you can see, “how to generate leads” is searched far more often as compared to “how to generate sales”. So remember that even though your content might be one of the best on the web, it won’t be read if you get the headline wrong.

But sometimes people don’t really know what they want till they see it. So how do you find out what your readers want if they aren’t searching it on search engines?

This is where Buzzsumo can help; it helps to gauge your customer’s interest through the number of social share a particular topic/keyword gets.

It allows you to categorise your result with date, type of content, country, and language. It also has an advance search function that lets you refine your search through words exclusion, url, author name etc. You can even categorise it based on the most shares for a specific network.

With these tools and information, you would then be able to craft a compelling offer from your headline. That’s not all though… you would still be able to improve on it with some tried and proven headline methods from John Caples.

Some of my favourites here:

• Start your headline with the word “New” — Given that a lot of the contents and products now are variations or outright duplicate of existing content (just take a look at the app store), the word “new” gives readers hope that they might find something different in your content.
• Offer information of value — As we mention before, readers are paying to read your article with their time, so if you promise them valuable information, they might just click on it.
• Be specific in your headline — Aim to be specific if you feature data or social proof in your headline. For example, write “How My Blog Post Brought 286 backlinks. And Counting!” rather than “How My Blog Post Brought Over 200 Backlinks. And Counting!”. You are more convincing when you are specific.
• Offer a shortcut — I am sure all of your are familiar with “list posts” (e.g. 10 ways…, 3 days to…, etc.). And the reason why these list posts works is because they offer a promise of achieving success in a short period of time.

Hopefully these tips gave you some inspiration for your next headlines. Feel free to share other tips below in the comments!

http://www.hashmeta.com/blog/write-headlines-get-clicks/