Five Effective Ways To Improve Your Click-Through Rate

What is a Click-Through rate?

So, you have added PPC in your digital marketing strategy? That is a smart move! Your SEO efforts, combined with an exceptionally performing PPC campaign, can make wonders happen for your business. Prepare yourself for a consistent stream of traffic on your website.

Firstly, you must examine how well is your PPC campaign performing. Is it interesting enough to encourage people to click on it? How will you know?

Answer: Click-through rate, or CTR.

If you are entering performance marketing, CTR is something you need to have a complete understanding of because it tells you a great deal about your PPC campaign’s performance. So, let’s dive right into it and get to know what CTR is and how you can improve it to boost conversions on your website.

Understanding the Click-Through Rate

CTR is one of the most important performance metrics that help you track the performance of your PPC ad campaign. To calculate these performance metrics, you have to divide the total number of people who clicked your ad, the number of clicks in simpler words by the number of times the ad appeared, known as impressions.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)=(Number of Clicks)/Impressions

A low CTR is an indication that your ad is not engaging. A high CTR tells you that your ad is impressing the viewers and encouraging them to click the ad. However, a high CTR and low conversion rates are an indication that your ad is not giving out the right message to your audience.

Improving Your Ad’s Click-Through Rates

Five Tactics for Success

Every business owner wants to get more clicks on their ads, you want that too, right? Well, it is time that you step up your PPC game and boost its CTR and increase the traffic on your website. The more traffic your website gets, the higher are the chances of conversion. Not only this, but a high CTR means a drop in the per-click cost.

The question is, “how do you get more clicks on your ads?

1. Know Your Audience

The first step in every marketing campaign is to understand your audience. If you do not know your audience and do not have a clear customer persona in your mind, your ads will most likely attract the wrong audience. Imagine selling customized cupcakes, and getting traffic of people who want to eat pizza. You see, this is how important knowing your audience is. It will help you choose the right keywords, the perfect images, and you can hit the right pain points.

Want to get ahead with your paid advertising? Start by thoroughly researching your audience.

2. Use of Countdown Timers

Do you know what works best in provoking an online surfer to click on your ad? Sense of urgency.

You need to instill a sense of urgency in your ad. To do that; you can use countdown timers. Instilling a sense of urgency is what the world terms as “FOMO,” which stands for Fear of Missing Out. The ads with a countdown on them, perform much better than those without a timer. The factor of FOMO is what triggers your potential customer to click your ad. If you have aligned your ad with your business’ definition, it will help you shorten the conversion funnel.

With countdown timers, you can boost the CTR by 32%. The best thing about these timers is that they do not require you to be computer-genius. All you have to do is add “[=” in your description or headline and just set the parameters. It is that simple!

Who knew improving the CTR would be so easy, right?

3. An Engaging Ad Copy

One of the essential factors in PPC ads is, of course, the ad copy. You need to provide value to the viewers in your ad copy. A short but engaging ad copy is what takes the win here. Users want to see is the value your products or service can bring to their doorstep.

Therefore, if you want to improve the CTR on your ad, you need to work on the quality of the ad copy. An ad that is successful in talking to a customer is an ad that generates a high CTR. You can work on your ad’s visual appeal, its content, and or maybe even add images to it. The more interesting and engaging your ad copy is, the better will be the CTR. You can hire PPC professionals to help you design the perfect ad for your business.

4. Keywords are Still in the Game

Who says that keywords are out of the game? Well, when it comes to PPC ad campaigns, keywords are one of the main players in attracting the target audience. You need to create compelling, unique, and specific keywords. Choosing broad keywords is not a smart move when designing an ad copy for PPC.

Keywords stuffing is not an option here. You need to use a limited and focused keyword that will help you attract qualified traffic.

If you want to up your PPC game, you need to bring keywords into the picture.

5. Testing to Improve

One thing that you need to understand is that PPC is all about trial and error. An error here can cost you big time, but this is what pay-per-click ad campaigns are. You have to test what’s working for you and what is not. Carrying out A/B testing on your ads is crucial as it allows you to tune-up your campaign and strives for a higher CTR and higher conversions.

A high CTR is an indication that your website holds valuable content for the users, which is results helps your website earn a higher ranking on the SERP. There is no fixed criterion of a ‘good’ CTR. For AdWords, it is 2%, while for Facebook ads, it is 0.9%. Anything above this is fantastic. You can hire a professional digital marketer to assist you with your PPC campaign and improve the CTR of your current campaign.

Matthew Goulart


|5 minutes read

Matthew Goulart is the founder of Ignite Digital, a Canadian digital marketing agency. Through Ignite Digital, Goulart works with Fortune 500 companies and advertising agencies from around the world and has helped launch profitable and highly successful digital marketing initiatives for his clients.