A ppc campaign isn’t just about out-spending your competition. Rather, it is about maximizing your campaigns efficiency and ROI. One of the strongest ways to do this is to maximize the CTR or Click Through Rate of your campaign.
Why is CTR Important?
There are some obvious answers like: to get maximum traffic or to be the smartest person in the room. However, the reality is that CTR is part of a much more complex picture.
Let’s start with what affects CTR:
The text used in the ad.
The keyword targets the ad is assigned.
The domain shown.
The day and time the ad is shown.
The ad position on the page.
Overall credibility of the ad.
Before we get too caught up in the importance of CTR, remember that your goal may be to have the highest ROI possible not the highest sales. In such a case you will be looking at sales volume per click rather than CTR as your most important KPI (Key Performance Indicator).
Back to CTR. Having a high CTR is beneficial in the Google ad system (AdWords) because Google will actually lower your CPC (cost per click) and improve your ad position relative to cost (really one in the same thing here) if your ad gets a higher click through rate than other ads. Why do they do this. Well, Google would say that there is a coincidence of interests here: primarily that Google wants to provide the most relevant content to users – this includes ads, secondarily Google can make more money on a slightly cheaper high CTR ad than a more expensive lower CTR ad.
How to Structure Your PPC Ad Text for Maximum CTR
This is a complex topic and the answer is different from product to product, for different categories, services etc. The number 1 rule – always – and really the golden rule of all internet marketing (and really all marketing in general) Test, Test, Test!
Some guidelines and ideas to try out are:
Make sure your ad is delivering on the promise the consumer you are targeting has in mind when they use the search term you are targeting. You must understand that a wide variety of people with a wide variety of intents will search for a given keyword. Sometimes the meaning or intent is very clear, other times there may be 5, 10 or more different common intentions. You want to be thinking of your ideal customer for a given keyword. This means that not all keywords are going to be maximum CTR KWs for you.
It may very well be that you target some keywords that aren’t in your sweet spot because they still represent a good opportunity for marginal business. The only keywords where you should be targeting max CTR is when those keywords are right in your sweetspot, that is, when the clear intent of the search term is for the product or service you sell.