Search engines place a high premium on a good click-through rate (CTR).
After all, in the pay-per-click model, the more someone clicks, the more money that search engine makes.
But CTR is important to advertisers, too. CTR tells you how well your message aligns with the people seeing it and whether you capture their interest.
When a user turns to a search engine, they have a question and are looking for an answer. They are expressing a need or want.
What makes Search so great is users are telling you exactly what they are looking for! They’ve already decided they need something and are now trying to find it.
Creating a relevant paid search ad is your first step as an advertiser in fulfilling that need. And CTR is one way of knowing whether you are fulfilling that need for searchers when they see your ads.
This guide will explain what click-through rate is, what a good CTR is, how it impacts your Ad Rank and Quality Score, and when a low CTR is considered OK.
What Is Click-Through Rate (CTR)?
Put simply, a click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that result in a click.
If your PPC ad had 1,000 impressions and one click, that’s a 0.1% CTR.
As a metric, CTR tells you how relevant searchers are finding your ad to be.
If you have a:
High CTR: Users are finding your ad to be highly relevant.
Low CTR: Users are finding your ad to be less relevant.
The ultimate goal of any PPC campaign is to get qualified users to come to your website and perform a desired action (e.g., make a purchase, fill out a lead or contact form, download a spec sheet).
CTR is the first step in the process of improving your ad’s relevancy and generating those desired actions.
What Is A Good CTR?
So, what’s a good click-through rate? Clients ask me this all the time.
The answer, as with many things in PPC, is “it depends.”
CTR is relative to:
Your industry.
The set of keywords you’re bidding on.
Individual campaigns within a PPC account.
It isn’t unusual to see double-digit CTR on branded keywords when someone is searching for your brand name or the name of your branded or trademarked product.
It also isn’t unusual to see CTRs of less than 1% on broad, non-branded keywords.
How CTR Impacts Ad Rank
CTR is not just an indication of how relevant your ads are to searchers. CTR also contributes to your ad rank in the search engines.
Ad Rank determines the position of your ad on the search results page.
That’s right – PPC isn’t a pure auction.
The top position doesn’t go to the highest bidder. It goes to the advertiser with the highest Ad Rank – and CTR is a huge factor in the Ad Rank formula.
But Ad Rank is even more complicated than that. Google measures your actual CTR against an expected CTR at the time of the auction.
So, if you’ve run a lot of ads with a low CTR, Google will assume that any new ads you add to your Google Ads account are also going to have a low CTR, and may rank them lower on the page.
This is why it’s so important to understand the CTR of your ads and to try to improve it as much as possible.
A poor CTR can lead to low ad positions, no matter how much you bid.
How CTR Impacts Quality Score
Quality Score is a measure of an advertiser’s relevance as it relates to keywords, ad copy, and landing pages.
The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you’ll see higher Quality Scores.
Quality Score is calculated by the engines’ measurements of expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.
A good CTR will help you earn higher Quality Scores.
While Quality Score is not a factor in the ad auction, it is an indicator of expected performance and will impact your CPCs.
Use Quality Score to diagnose how your ads will show, and to improve your ad copy and landing pages.
When A Low CTR Is OK
Since CTR is so important, should you optimize all of your ads for CTR, and forget about other metrics, like conversion rate?