How To Fix A Low Click-Through Rate

CTR, or Click To Rate, is an indicator showing the percentage ratio between the number of clicks on our ad and the number of impressions on our ad. Therefore, CTR shows the effectiveness of our activities. The higher the CTR, the more relevant our ad is. Low CTR, at the level of several percent, should be worried.

What can we do with the fact that our advertisement is displayed to hundreds of users / potential customers if only a few of them click on it?

In this article, I will introduce several ways how to increase CTR in your AdWords campaigns.

Create a clear campaign structure

First of all, don’t put everything in one bag. When I optimize my campaigns, I often see campaigns made up of only two or three ad groups, with one very similar ad content, but supporting dozens of keywords in very different areas. Such organization of the campaign is a bad idea. If your advertisement having in the headline e.g. Divorce Lawyers in London, displayed on the slogan “Lawyers In UK”, it is very likely that seeing your advertisement the user will click on the advertisement of the competition, which will have content more accurately suited to the user’s query.

When planning or rebuilding your AdWords campaign, always group similar themes into one area, e.g. a specific service or product group. Extract these terms into separate ad groups and create better-tailored ads for them that will target the most relevant landing pages as possible.

At this stage, you can also extract terms with a high CTR, for which you will prepare a dedicated, even better-matched ad.

Prepare the best content

Use keywords in your ads – in the title, description and URL visible in the ad. The ad using the keywords tailored to the user’s query content is a clear message for the user that clicking on the ad will appear on the page he is looking for.

Add the main advantages of your offer – if your offer has features that can be a significant advantage over the competition, e.g. shipping in 24h, free delivery, current promotion, put this information in the content of your advertisement.

Post specific information – if a specific feature may support the decision to choose your product or service, place this information in the content of the advertisement.

Use numbers – this is an element of content that catches the eye. If you can boast of any number, do it, e.g. 3,000 units sold, 100% positive feedback, 20 years on the market.

Grab your attention with your headline – there are many ways to do this, I will tell you one – be current. For example, if you run a mail-order florist and your day is March 22, or Mother’s Day, then prepare a dedicated ad text for this occasion.

Use extensions

Extensions are additional information that you can add to your ad in various forms. The more information the ad contains, the greater the chance that any of them will interest the user, and as a result will lead to a click on your ad. AdWords gives us the following extension formats:

Call extensions – active phone number, after clicking on which the connection occurs. It can be used to promote services that generally require quick phone contact – e.g. roadside assistance.

Extension of sitelinks – allows you to add additional description links to the ad, link other subpages that may interest the user.

Callout extensions – this is a place for additional information that you could not fit in your ad headlines or options.

Message extension – lets you send an email to you from an advertisement

Location extension – especially in campaigns where the distance between the user and your company, the customer service point is important. Often, it’s the location that decides which company to choose.

Price/promotion extension – is a function that allows you to add information about prices, promotions and sales to your ad.

Actively manage your budget

I do not mean that you would raise or lower your daily or monthly budget, but rather that you would try to promote the best keywords in your current budget that would give you a chance to improve your CTR.

How to do it?

Remove keywords from your campaign that generate impressions but don’t generate clicks.

Please remove keywords with very low CTR from your campaign. You can transfer the funds you earn in this way to keywords with a high CTR.

Increase the bid for clicking on keywords that are satisfactory for you, but the average position of the ad showing in the answer is 1.0. Higher rates per click will allow them to show higher in the search results list.

Reduce the reach of campaigns / groups / words

In order to improve the click-through rate on ads, we usually decide to increase their reach. However, this will not help us improve CTR. If you want to improve your CTR, you should consider reducing your campaign’s reach. This can be done by limiting yourself to the most promising keywords I discussed in the previous section.

What else we can do?

Match Keywords with ad description. This allows you to narrow down the list of keywords and their variations that our ad will show on. We can only show them on the best-converting terms.

Exclude unwanted keywords – prepare lists of unwanted keywords that are created to indicate words for which we do not want to appear with the ad. For example, if we have a coffee machine in our offer, but we don’t have it in red, we can exclude the word red. This means that our ad will not appear on the red coffee machine.

Locations – AdWords allows us to manage the geographical area we want because our advertising campaign has appeared. Running a restaurant with delivery up to 5km, we can limit the campaign by a radius of 5 km from our take away place. When running a broad nationwide campaign, it is worth analyzing clicks from various locations – provinces and cities – and creating campaigns focused on locations with the best CTR.

Schedule – AdWords also allows us to indicate the exact days of the week and the times at which our ad should appear. It is worth analyzing at what times and days of the week our ad records the best results and transfer the budget to them excluding hours in which it enjoys rather low interest.

Finally, one simple piece of advice. If your campaign has a low CTR or your CTR has started to fall recently, it is worth checking what ads your competition serves to users, analyze and create better ones.

The above suggestions should increase the CTR and ultimately the effectiveness of the campaign. Using multiple solutions will allow you to test which of the solutions is most useful for your business.

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