What Is Click Through Rate?

Understanding your click-through rate, or CTR, is vital for your business. It helps you understand your customers, their online behavior, and lets you know what is and what isn't working when trying to reach your target audience. CTR is a digital marketing metric generally used to measure the success of marketing efforts. In this article, we will dive deeper into what CTR is, why it’s important, and ways to improve it.

What Is Click-Through Rate and Why Is It Important?

In simple terms, click-through rate, or CTR, refers to the percentage of people that click on your ad, link, or call to action after seeing it. Calculating your CTR is incredibly important because it indicates the effectiveness of PPC campaigns, metadata, email subject lines, ad copy, keyword usage, and more. It is also one of the key factors in Google’s Quality Score formula, a number that Google uses to determine your ad position and cost per click.

Knowing your CTR will also influence future ad placements. This number gives you an idea of how people are responding to your ads and whether or not you’re targeting the right audience. The main objective of any PPC campaign is to get potential customers to come to your website or landing page and perform a desired action. This can include providing an email in return for a digital download, purchasing something, signing up for a course, etc. A clear understanding of your CTR will help improve your ads, get you a higher Quality Score, and ideally, entice people to perform the actions you'd like them to.

How to Calculate Click-Through Rate?

To calculate your click-through rate, take the number of times an ad is clicked on and divide it by the total number of impressions (the number of times a person was exposed to the ad). Then take that number and multiply it by 100. This will give you a percentage which is the CTR. For example, if an online ad has been seen by 1,000 people and clicked by 50 of them, it has a CTR of 5%. The higher the number, the more profitable your ads are considered to be.

What Is a Good Click-Through Rate?

What constitutes a good CTR depends on what industry you’re in, what keywords you’re bidding on, the individual campaigns within a PPC account, etc. It is essential to research your industry’s click-through rates. Only then can you begin strategizing how you can increase your CTR and reach your business’s goals. Your ideal ad CTR can take some time to determine. There is no precise number when establishing a good CTR, but 2% is average for an account as a whole. Anything higher would be considered above average.

How to Improve Click-Through Rate

There are many factors to consider when trying to improve your click-through rate. First ask yourself, where do you want to improve CTR? This will determine what strategy to implement. If you want to increase the CTR on a PPC ad you’ll need to optimize your headline and copy. You can do this is by using specific keyword(s) and making it clear that you have the solution or the answer to a problem that the user has. Evoking emotion is key when you’re composing a headline and ad copy.

Strategies to Improve Your Click-Through Rate

Use Longtail Keywords

One of the most effective ways to influence CTR is by using longtail keywords. This is extremely powerful, because someone searching for “Italian leather brown bag” is more likely to hit the purchase button compared to someone simply searching “bag.” The more detailed a search is, the more likely it is that the person who entered the query is looking for a specific thing and will buy it once they find it.

Include a CTA

Always include a strong call to action or CTA. Assuming your initial ad copy is well written, keyword-rich, solves a problem, and evokes emotion, clicking on the CTA should feel like a no-brainer for the prospective customer.

Use Images

Using the right images can make a huge difference in your CTR. Of course, this depends on the marketing channel you’re targeting, but studies have shown that, overall, people tend to click on links attached to images that they are drawn to.

Incorporate Hashtags

In a world where there are around 4 billion people using social media, the use of general hashtags won’t cut it anymore. Skip the oversaturated hashtags and instead use more specific hashtags for your industry. This can increase the chances of your ads being shown to the right audience.

Optimize Your Website

Improving your site’s speed is essential to increasing your CTR. What good is it if someone clicks on a CTA but the loading time on your site is too slow? You’ll likely lose the lead or prospective customer. A quick google search will show you several tools that can help with this.

Once you have a better understanding of what click-through rate is and why it’s important, you’ll have a clearer picture of who your customers are and what they want. This data will help you tremendously when it comes to targeting your ideal customers and increasing your chances of converting them into paying customers. Though there are many ways you can improve your CTR, remember, it is imperative that you limit each test to a single variable and gather the data. This is the only way you can be sure of what is working.