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| What is a good click through rate? |
By:
Joe Ford |
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At Netvantage Marketing, we try to consume as much educational information as possible to stay current on search marketing and web analytics topics. Last week found me sitting in on a webinar presented by Search Engine Watch. The webinar was very solid in its presentation, and I am always a fan and a follower of the leaders in our industry. It is available here in case you missed it. At the end of the call, the presenter took on some questions. Predictably, the question of click through rate came in, "In your experience, what has been a good click through rate?"
If you are managing a Google Adwords campaign, or have even just dabbled your company in the arena of pay per click marketing, you should be familiar with the definition of click through rate, or CTR. If you haven't - a quick review. Click through rate is defined as the amount of times your ad was displayed based on a search query to the amount of times your ad was clicked.
We often get asked in business development and client meetings what is good CTR. Well, it isn't as easy as, "Well, we normally benchmark at 10% for our campaigns." If that is an automatic response by your search marketing provider, RUN! There are many, many factors that go into CTR. Specifically, the campaign, target audience, ad groups, and keywords. Let's focus on keywords today.
If you are using a keyword within your campaign that can carry different meanings, a low CTR may be the best CTR. Take the example of the keyword "mustangs" If you are breeding mustang horses for sale, then you certainly want to use mustang and certain variations of mustang in your ad campaign. But where will the majority of search impressions on this keyword come from? More than likely the popular car made by Ford Motor Company. So your ad can appear next to the classic car dealership around in the next town over. Certainly, you would not want to pay for this click, as you do not have anything relevant to offer a searcher looking for cars. Thus, given the high level of impressions of Ford mustangs, would you want a high CTR? Of course not, it would probably mean that your ad listing was poorly written to qualify what you offered on your site, and you were paying for lots of useless clicks.
It is important to consider this when trying to determine "good" CTR. It really doesn't have a meaning without seeing how those searchers perform on your site upon arrival. Web analytics should be used to measure how effective a campaign is. My colleague at Netvantage Marketing Adam Henige has written several good articles on web analytics as well. As searchers become more savvy, CTR will be a metric that only tells a fraction of the story of campaign effectiveness. Pay attention to how long these users stay on your site, their page views, and their navigational paths beyond your landing page. Evaluate how some search terms tend to produce longer and more productive visits than others.
In our mustang example, we would certainly want to pay close attention to one page view visits that originate from your campaign. If you are seeing a lot of these occurrences, evaluate the ad text being used, and be sure that it is written clearly enough qualify your visitor.
It is in these cases where impressions are high that a low CTR means we are doing a good job and only attracting qualified visitors to click onto our site. If over a week a keyword receives 10,000 impressions and your ad only receives 50 clicks, that CTR is .5%. Is it that bad? What if those 50 visitors spend a high amount of time on your site and you received 15 contact form submissions? Compare this with 10,000 impressions and 200 clicks for a CTR of 2%. A higher CTR may seem good. However if web analytics tells us that the majority of these visits had a high bounce rate, did not spend a lot of time on site, and only resulted in 5 contact form submission...you get the idea. All of a sudden "good CTR" takes on a new meaning.
Keep these factors in mind when trying to define your paid search campaign with CTR. It is important to consider the keyword impressions, visitor qualification, and backing these considerations with web analytics to measure the quality of those visits to reinforce the effectiveness of the campaign. That means we are maximizing our investment into our search engine bid funds. And that is a definition of what good click through rate really means.
Joe Ford is a Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan SEO, ppc management and web analytics consulting company.
About the author:
Joe Ford is a Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan SEO, ppc management,and web analytics consulting company. |
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