SIMPLE WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR CTR FOR GOOGLE SEARCH ADS

If you are a beginner or just getting started or even running Google search ads for your company, these 5 tasks can come in handy.

Some of you might have this question often How do I improve my CTR? How to get more clicks on your Google ads? How to raise CTR without affecting the budget? I will list out a few strategies for the same. So, stay tuned and keep reading…

You need to improve your CTR because it has a significant impact on your Quality Score (QS) Higher QS means you will bid less vs. your competitors because your ad rank is the blend of your QS and your bid. For example, you have 10/10 QS vs. your competitor who has a lower score then Google with prefer your ad over your competitor in the auction. This is because Google runs on the fundamentals of relevance.

This means your ads are organized, relevant, have a stronger CTR, strong bid and you offer an optimum landing page experience. A perfect amalgamation of these factors is going to boost the strength of your campaign.

To do all this you really need to follow these 5 simple tasks:

1.     Adding Negative Keywords to The Broad Keywords

According to Hubspot data, the average CTR for a search ad is 1.91% and 0.35% for a display ad. So you want to stay above this fig. and keep improving this number as you go forward. The best way to do that is by adding negative keywords to the broad keywords that show up on your search term report. Remember to keep the negative keywords in “exact match” instead of “phrase match” you don’t want to kill your campaign.

2.     Analyze Your Auction Insights

You can find Auction insights on the search term report or on the left side quick links:

This will show you how you are competing with your competitors for the keywords or the dynamic ads that you are targeting when you enter the auction at the same time as your competitors.

You can compare a range of metrics including impression share, avg. position, overlap rate, top page rage, etc… the list goes on…! You can keep improving your relevance to keep doing well on various metrics to out beat your competition. There are some key metrics like “Position above rate” that you want to keep a close watch on to know how often your competition is ranked above you, so if there is a particular competition you want to outsell then you need to stay on top on them more often. It’s the same with your avg.position, you need to stay available to get more traction and clicks.  Using this insight, you can implement an individual strategy for each of the metrics that you need to improve. You can also compare your entire journey vs your competitor and improve accordingly to be the best and improve that crucial CTR.

3.     Bidding High Enough to Enter the Auction

Remember, you need to bid high enough to enter the auction. If you are not bidding strong enough to enter the first-page bid then your ad is not going to show.

This is what I do select all keywords, edit, then click on Change max CPC bids and,

Raise bids to First page CPC. You can also decide how far you are willing to raise these bids by setting a Max bid limit. For example, the average is ￡3 per click you can choose ￡5 or ￡7 till which you are willing to go maximum at any instance.

Once you have your bids stronger, this is when you want to keep your QS real stronger. The best way to do that is going to be step 4.

4.     Making Sure to Have Optimized And Relevant Ads

You have a range of ads types like expanded text ads, responsive search ads so you do as much A/B test as possible. You need to ensure that you have at least 3 highly relevant ads in every keyword group, you need to also ensure that your ads are also relevant to your landing pages.

While creating your ads you need to make sure that you have all the headlines in your expanded text ads, a proper display path with two different descriptions, and ad extensions. All of this will improve your ad relevance aligning with what your potential audiences are searching for and give you a higher CTR. The key is to have relevant ads, use the latest ad formats like responsive search ads, etc, complete expanded text ads, and have variations.

Variation is also very critical because the more Google can test your ad impressions while serving your ads the more data, they are able to collect and the more suggestions and feedback they can offer to optimize your campaign. Just do what you have to do, and Google will do the rest, it’s that simple!

Finally, let me touch upon a small but crucial part I briefly touched upon in the above point.

5.     Make Sure to Have Ad Extensions

You can go all the way up to twenty have Ad extensions total per ad group or campaign. I recommend you to have at least 4 ad extensions per ad group. The more targeted extensions you have the better your Ad rank is going to be this is because your QS is going to significantly improve. You got a range of extensions including Sitelink: You can specify the link text and URLs, Callout: to include additional text to highlight specific information, Structured snippet:  to highlight certain aspects, Call Extensions: this allows you to add phone numbers to your ads, etc….

To sum up, CTR is Inversely proportional to the CPC. Therefore, the key is to keep improving your CTR.

You can simply follow these tasks to keep your ads relevant and improve the interaction rate over time. A good CTR will lead to a better QS which will lead to better ad ranks and help you lower costs over a period of time. The main objective is to drive more conversion and help you stay within your target budget. This is more relevant than ever during this critical period when every penny counts!

So stay safe and convert more!