Today we’re talking about Google Ads CTR, or click through rate. We’re going to talk about what it is.
We’re going to talk about what a good number should be and we’re going to talk about how to increase it if the number isn’t exactly where you want it to be.
So this is kind of a redo of a video that we did about a year ago, or an addition to, I should say.
It’s something that we got a lot of really good questions on and we wanted to kind of show you some examples of real world accounts and give you an idea of the kind of industries that they’re in.
We’re going to show you some accounts that we actually are managing for other clients and kind of talk about the industries that you’re in, what kind of numbers you should be seeing, and how to improve those numbers if you’re not seeing what you’re going to see on our screens.
So let’s dive in right now and take a look.
Understanding Click Through Rates
All right, so here we are looking at several of our client’s campaigns. Now, one thing I want to point out is these click through rates are really kind of all over the board.
You can see there’re a couple of them here that are actually paused right now, so they aren’t running, but we’ve got everything from 3% to 12%, 4%, 10%, 6%, 6%,6%, 12%, 12.8%, and on down the board.
Now one thing I want you to remember is there’s a lot of different things going on in each of these different accounts. So for instance, I happen to know that this account, the click through rate is much higher for the search campaigns.
However, it will always be much lower for display campaigns. There is search and display campaigns going on inside this account here. So that will average out when we look at this overall number. So you need to keep that in mind.
And just to give you an example of how display campaigns can mess with your click through rate averages, here we are inside a campaign that’s been running for quite a while, but you can see these different ad groups, 10%, 9%, 13%, 23%, 18%, but then we get these ones that are less than 1%.
These were both display ad campaigns. Then we get back 23%, 18%, 13%, 6%, 8%, 3%. This was very underperforming here, but then we get to another display campaign, 0.43%.
Get The Average
All of these are actually really good click through numbers, or the majority of them are, but as an average it averages out to 5%. So that’s one thing you need to keep in mind when looking at it as an account average. You got to take these things into account.
In this particular campaign. Right now we aren’t running any display ads. You can see right now those are running at 12.5% click through rate, which is extremely high.
But in some of these other ones, 4.24%, 6.19%, 6.74%, most of them are just chugging right along.
So what are the best click through rates or CTR that you have in your campaigns? Do us a favor and let us know in the comment section below.
Also let us know what industry you’re in so other people can kind of look at that and compare their numbers to yours.
So across the industry we’ve seen everything and we’re talking large agencies and large PPC software companies that they say their averages are 2%.
The click through average might be 1.5%. So we see them kind of all over the board, anywhere between 1.5% and probably 3.5% on average.
But what they don’t talk about is is that at the beginning of the campaign is that overall what does that entail? So we always say that we have two benchmarks that we like to see.
We like to see out of the gates hitting 3% to 4%. Then over time, usually within 90 days, we want that up above 5% if at all possible. Once again, it always depends on the situation.
There are certain campaigns in certain industries and certain locations that that’s going to be really hard to hit.
The More People Clicking Your Ad, The More Opportunities Of Selling
But the biggest goal is to always be improving on your click through rates. The more people that you can get to click your ad, that’s more opportunities for you to sell your product or your service. So always be improving.
Now we also said we’re going to show you some different things that you can do to improve click through rates. Number one, what type of business are you advertising?
Once again, different industries are going to have different click through rates.
Service businesses, if somebody is looking for an emergency plumber because they a pipe break at midnight, that’s actually going to get a really high click through rate as long as you’re writing your ads well.
Number two, what type of devices are you advertising on? Depending on if you’re on mobile, desktop or tablets, you aren’t going to get different click through rates for each one of those.
Different Devices… Different Click Through Rates
So you need to be aware of that. Different devices are going to have different click through rates.
Now if you have 95% of your conversions coming through mobile and your mobile click through rates are 10% you might want to turn all of your traffic onto mobile or at least really decrease your bids on desktop ads because your click through rates and your conversions are really driven on mobile.
Number three, how much competition is there? Depending on if you’re in a large Metro area or a small rural community, if you happen to, maybe you’re advertising nationwide and you have a a lot of competition.
The more competition, the more ads. The more ads, the more opportunity there is for other people to get those clicks. So that will have a factor.
To help eliminate that maybe you eliminate some of your really highly searched keywords and really narrow it down to some of those longer tail keywords where there is less competition.
And this kind of ties into the next one. What is your ad saying? So that brings us into number four.
How relevant is your ad? If you have specific keywords that people are typing into Google, you should have those keywords in the beginning of your headline of your ad.
The reason being is Google highlights them and makes them bold so you can see it easier. It captures your eye when you’re doing a search. Try it now.
So here we did a search for radon removal and as you can see, the keyword comes up at the beginning of this ad, but it also highlights the keywords or versions of the keyword in that particular ad and it catches your eye because it’s got the keyword right here immediately and it’s got a number of instances of that keyword throughout the ad. It definitely catches your eye more than the next one down.
So make sure you group your keywords very tight together because the more alike that those keywords are, the easier it is to write an ad that encompasses those particular keywords.
And last, this might be the most important one. Is your landing page working like it’s supposed to? Now, why does that have an impact on your click through rates?
Because if people are clicking your ads and getting to your page, wherever you’re sending them, your landing page, whatever it might be, and they’re not taking action, they’re just immediately clicking that back button, Google is measuring that.
When that happens a lot, Google tends to place your ads further down the page, which means that even though somebody has done a search and your ad might be on that page, it might not be viewable because it’s all the way down at the bottom.
It’s still considered an impression even though nobody saw it. It’s just further down the page. The further down that page means more impressions you can get down there, but less people are going to click them and that will affect your click through rates. Make sense?
So one thing I want you to take away from all of this is just make sure that no matter what, you’re always trying to improve those click through rates.
Some of them may be slower, some of them may be faster. But if you’re always improving your click through rates, that’s more opportunity for you to get customers into your business.
So if you are not hitting the CTR or click through rate numbers that you want to hit and you would like some help inside your campaigns, down below in the description area is a link to our consulting packages where you can purchase a 30 or one hour window where we can go in with you inside your campaigns, take a look at what’s going on and give you some suggestions on how to improve your campaigns.
Thank you for checking our post on: What is a Good CTR for Google Ads?
Check Out Some Of Our Other Great Posts:
Do Google Ads Work for Small Business