Google Adwords is a great way of getting leads, customers to your site, increasing your email database and generally improving your brand awareness. However, working on Adwords campaigns is a 24/7 job and needs constant attention and improvements. You might wonder now why click through rate is very important for your campaigns. The thing is that CTR affects your cost per click, your ranking and consequently your conversion rate. Parameters and factors are changing daily in Adwords, competition may be increased, articles in websites may also affect your content campaigns etc. You can never be 100% sure on your results but you have to test and try new things that might work. Here are some great ways of improving you Click through rate on your ppc campaign.
Better Ads
Ok now you might say that this is easy but how? Don’ t get me wrong. Good ads are built by quality keywords and adgroups and apparently are affecting your ctr. Nevertheless, no matter how good keywords you have, you also have to create catchy ads. How? Firstly, spend some time on competition. Search on your keywords and see you your competitors are advertising their products. Secondly, be great on copywriting! And if you can’t do that, hire a great copywriter. It is very important to provide a great message to your potential customers and attract their attention. You might also realise that a past effective ad is now not running well. Then, you have to probably pause it and create a new one!
Relevancy
The key to great campaigns if we had to eliminate it in one word is relevancy. This is a factor that depends on how your keywords, adgroups, ads and landing page are relevant. This contributes to your quality score and consequently affects your ctr. Thus, the higher the relevancy the better the attribution that your campaigns show.
Extensions
A very good and easy technique for improving your ctr is adding an ad extension. This is a great way of giving your potential customer more reasons on clicking your ad, by adding more information about your business. Although ad extension have been around for years, Google had recently added conversion tracking data to help advertisers measure extensions performance. You can add extensions for location, further information, products and much more.
Understanding Match type in Keywords
Google has 3 types of matching types in keyword research. Those are broad match, phrased match and exact match. Each of these has also a negative match type. It is very important to understand how these matching types are actually working and how this can affect your campaign performance. Test which of the matching type best suits your campaigns and track the performance. Most of advertisers find exact match really strict for their keywords however every adwords campaign run differently and requires testing.
Negative keywords
As very important it is to add relevant keywords and use matching types correctly, it is also very important to understand the significant role of negative words. When you are using and placing negative words you are instantly eliminating your ads from untargeted and unwanted impressions. Therefore, you earn from a potential click and moreover you are saving money from your daily budget. For example, if you are selling books then surely the phrase ‘for free’ is a negative keyword for your campaigns. You don’t want to mislead people or more importantly you don’t want to pay per click for people who are searching for ‘books for free’.
Dynamic keyword insertion
Dynamic keywords insertion is an advanced feature that Google provides to advertisers in order to improve their results. This feature allows you to dynamically inform and update your ad according to the users search. DKI assist you to generate more relevant ads to your potential customers needs and in the meantime having a variety of ads for a number of keywords. All you have to do is to add an keyword insertion code to your ad and you will be having a lot of similar ads according to your keywords and users searches. Be careful with keyword editing when using insertion. Make sure that your keywords are relevant and fit well because you might end up with ads that have no meaning and might confuse your customers.
Modify schedule
In Google adwords possibilities are endless and you might have a low CTR because of a bad scheduling of your campaigns. The best way to understand this is to track your performance and measure your outcomes in different parts of the day. For example, some campaigns run effectively and have conversions in day time and have showed that during the night the cost per click is higher and the CTR is lower. Therefore, you have to schedule your campaign to run only the hours that are effective to you. Keep in mind that this depends on your product and consequently your target audience.
Offer something
Another great tip of improving your ctr is giving away something to your customers. Users are more likely to click on your ad when you are offering something for example ‘free shipping’, ‘10% off to all’. You can also place your offer with an ad extension as we mentioned above.
Rating Extensions
Seller ratings are huge to some merchants and can have a significant impact to your ctr. They are helping potential customers to recognise which sellers are reviewed by already customers. These star rating extensions add to your site credibility and trust and make it to the users more possible to click on your ads. Don’t forget that a picture worth a thousand words and thus users can be affected by star rating.
So do you have any recent experience of how you improved you CTR? What worked for your campaigns?
