What Is It?
A percentage that represents the number of clicks an ad received in relation to the number of impressions (views) it received.
How Is It Calculated?
The number of clicks is divided by the number of impressions.
Example:
An ad was shown 1,000 times. Of the 1,000 times shown, it was clicked 25 times. The CTR is 2.50%.
Why It’s Important?
CTR is the most important factor used to calculate the Quality Score assigned to the keywords you are bidding on within your Pay-Per Click (PPC) account (for more information about Quality Score, see my past blog article on the subject).
Quality Scores play a major role in determining how much you pay for a click (Actual CPC) on your ad.
What’s a Good CTR?
This depends on what you are trying to accomplish, but a general rule of thumb is anything over 2.00% is a good CTR.
The Bottom Line
Improving your CTR will improve your Quality Score and this will lower your PPC costs!
How to Improve Your CTR
There are many ways to improve your CTR including:
- Ensure keywords are relevant
- Pause keywords that are under-performing
- Add more long-tail keywords
- Ensure your ads include your top-performing keywords
Do you have other ideas about how to improve CTR? Tell me below in the comments. I look forward to sharing ideas on how to improve our PPC campaigns!