What is a Good Click Through Rate and How Can You Achieve It?

As marketers look for new and innovative ways to target potential customers one question that frequently bothers them is what is a good click through rate.

Well click through rates require special attention and you should know what numbers you are looking at.

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Click through rates vary by both industries as well as network.

Also, CTR is affected by a variety of factors, which are difficult to control.

These factors include target audience, industry sectors, channels, etc. So, what is a good click through rate?

All these defining factors make this question extremely tricky to answer.

Now, “what is a good click through rate”, “average click through rate” or “how to improve click through rate” are the age old question, which is frequently asked by the clients as well as the PPC managers alike.

Although we can say that the higher this value the better it is, the debate on what differentiates a sub-par versus a good account CTR still continues.

In this blog we have tried to provide you with a definitive answer to this question. Although we completely agree that several factors are at play.

In addition, we will be answering this particular question only with respect to Bing Ads and Google AdWords.

Which Are These Factors?

Let us now understand which are these factors that affect CTR.

Following are some of the major factors that are known to impact your CTRs and the ones that help you understand definition click through rate:

Relevance

This is a comprehensive factor that includes everything from the search query to your landing page.

Rather than individually listing these, we have included keyword match type, bid, audience/negative keywords, ad copy as well as quality score as some of the major relevance factors.

The higher your ads and keywords are relevant to each other, the relevancy of your ads to the search queries will also be higher.

So, these elements should work in tandem to accomplish a better Click Through Rate.

Network

Google Shopping campaigns and Search Network texts for the most part are known to have phenomenally higher Click Through Rates when compared to the Display campaigns.

Besides, remarketing campaigns also have the required potential to achieve higher CTRs when compared to various other kinds of Display campaigns.

Ad Ranking

Ad position can be low at times, even when there is higher relevance throughout.

So, you can considering both ad extensions as well as Google Shopping ad units.

At this point the significance of a text ad will hugely diminish.

Ultimately if your ad falls below the specific fold on the search browser, potentially you will be able to accrue several impressions without even the ad being seen ever again.

The Device

CTR is known to vary by device while dovetailing off the ad rank.

In general, we were able to find that when compared to tablet and desktop CTR, the mobile Click Through Rate is extremely higher.

Mobile ads are known to take up most of the screen space of the mobile. Often this leaves the users only with some images before they scroll down.

Supporting Data

Well, a general rule of thumb would be to have over a 100 impressions for any given keyword, ad group, campaign or an ad copy before you try to optimize it.

However, there are exceptions for everything, still this threshold makes a great baseline because it provides every specific item its fair chance to succeed.

Industry Verticals

CTRs hugely vary from one vertical to another, particularly when you consider the competition.

For instance, terms related to “lawyers” are always far more expensive and will also have huge search volume.

Besides, any of the above discussed factors may have an influence resulting in fluctuations in the CTR.

What Can You Conclude?

Based on all these factors a good CTR is somewhere around 2%.

However, the others might argue that this particular “2%” is way too low.

We are definitely not arguing that as soon as you hit a CTR of 2%, everything will just begin working as per your requirements.

As a marketer it is important for you to always strive continuously to improve your CTR along with your conversion rate goals as well as cost per conversion.

However, our stance is that while considering all the possible factors in the current PPC world, this 2% strategy of Click Through Rate should actually sound good.

Evaluating the Considerations

When we say that 2% CTR for the account, we will mostly be talking about the individual campaigns that have the better as well as the worst CTRs.

For instance, let us say that your Shopping and branded campaigns might be having CTRs which are very high – may be over 2%, while the others might be having much below this percentage.

Also, just having a greater Click Through Rate does not necessarily always mean that it is a very good campaign.

This can also be an indication which states that your account is just wasting the spend by providing advertising to those users who might just not end up converting.

These include people who might be less interested in what you might be offering – be it services or product.

Besides, Display network campaigns are known to accrue more number of impressions at relatively much lower CTRs.

So, the overall account Click Through Rate here is weighed down to more than that of the search campaigns.

Even with all these considerations we still consider an ideal CTR rate to be 2%.

Inevitably every marketer would want to know how their CTR is when compared to their competitors in that particular vertical.

So, we have made a cautious attempt to answer this, particularly because there are no specific studies that compare Click Through Rate across different verticals.

Well, there are some studies though, but none of these have conclusive data that we find suitable to draw a conclusion.

In addition, Click Through Rate benchmarks also vary from one industry to another.

So, you can get a clear picture about how well your account is performing by combining various other KPIs with your Click Through Rate.

You can get competitive data by leveraging Google’s native tools. However, these figures will only be estimates rather than accurate dependable values.

Summing Up

Both marketers as well as clients are constantly questioning about how to improve their CTR.

However, at the very basic level everything comes down to one or the other of the factors that are outlined above.

So, the best way to go about would be to develop an account that is well structured that easily provides the search users that they are looking for.

Take some time to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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