Maisie Lloyd
I'm passionate about recording the world, but most of all driven by creativity and collaborative environments. My experience revolves around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
What is a CTR?
A click-through rate is the volume of users that physically tap into a website/ ad or campaign link. The click-through rate is a fantastic metric for gauging the success of a campaign and its effectiveness in enticing customers.
It is a metric commonly seen amongst PPC and Paid social campaigns; it is also an insight which is used for social content with links.
The metric is worked out by dividing the number of impressions on the content by the number of clicks. For example, if 2000 people see it, but only two click on it, there would be a CTR of 0.2%.
A high click-through rate demonstrates clear relevance and effectiveness, whilst a low click-through rate is poorly performing and shows that it isn’t relevant or interesting enough.
What makes the CTR so valuable because of pay-per-clicks. Pay-per-click is the model used to determine the cost of a customer lead, so for each click, the search engine will earn a certain amount of money, which the business advertising pays.
Achieving a great CTR
The first facet to achieving a great CTR is to establish what an ideal volume of users clicking on content would be, as well as the overall cost-per-click.
A good CTR factors in a few different things, like the keywords which have been bided on, the industry the business is in, and the individual campaigns that are occurring.
CTR typically tend to be higher when the keyword they have searched for includes the brand name. Whilst words which are relevant to the service or product they sell will be slightly more competitive, they will likely see a lower CTR.
Does the CTR impact ranking?
The CTR can impact the overall ranking as it’s considered as part of the search engines ranking formula, i.e. Google. The ranking isn’t necessarily established by going to the highest bidder. Instead, it factors in previous campaigns’ CTR to predict the CTR for the up-and-coming campaign.
If a brand has historically had low click-through rates, then the search engine is more likely to rank them lower down. This highlights the importance of an effective PPC campaign, those which aren’t should be analysed and worked on in order for future campaigns to have a higher probability of success.
What is a quality score?
As defined by Google, a quality score is an estimated value of the quality of an ad, landing page, and keyword. Those with higher quality ads will likely pay less and have better ranking for their ads.
Quality scores can be added to reports by simply adding a quality score column.
The score is measured on a scale of 1-10 and incorporates the landing page experience, click-through rate, and ad relevance. Notably, higher click-through rates are more likely to get a higher quality score.
The quality scores can help forecast the success of a campaign, the ranking on the SERP, as well as the impact on cost-per-clicks.
Is Success determined by a good CTR?
Click-through rates are important, but they aren’t the only metric that determines the success of an ad campaign, so whilst yes, a high CTR in some cases might be good, it may also be a lot of clicks and not much money earned from those clicks. Signalling a clear disconnect between the ad and the product being sold.
Actually, a more important metric to look at would be the cost-per-click. Equally, ranking is important, but it doesn’t always mean a campaign has been successful.
Understanding your business goals and deciding on the most important metric will help you establish what is a successful campaign. For companies hoping to sell a product or service, the cost per sale is more likely to be an important metric to focus on.
When the goal for a metric a business places importance on is not met, the click-through rate can be assessed. This can help marketers determine what did and didn’t work across multiple campaigns to make data-informed strategy changes.
Even though the click-through rate is important and should be analysed when looking at the performance of a campaign, looking at metrics like the conversion rate, the return on ad spend or cost per lead.
