Click Through Rates and Google

What is CTR, and what does it mean to have a high CTR? How does it affect you, and what does Google say? CTR stands for click through rate, and having a high one means a lot of people click on your ads to go to your site.

This makes Google happy (sine they get paid for each click) and you happy because you get visitors. Your CTR is calculated by dividing the number of views an ad has by the number of clicks it receives – and if you combine your skill for writing ad copy with your landing page relevancy, you can increase your CTR and actually pay leess per click – all at the same time!

Your CTRdepends on the ad copy you write. You can have good CTR if your keywords are very focused and targeted, and you are running them in the right market at the right time. A good CTR is runs around 1-2% -out of 100 veiwings, 1-2 people click on your ad.The more specific your ad group and better written your copy, the higher your CTR.

Your CTR is just one aspect of what you pay per click, however. You have to make sure that your landing page is actually relevant to your ad copy. When Google sees people using ads that look like they were about one thing to trick people into clicking on them – then serving up a landing page about something unrelated to the keywords used, they get mad. Thier reputation for serving up relevant content is being damaged.

For this reason, Google looks at your entire setup and assigns you a Quality Score, which factors into your charge per click. If your landing page is NOT relevant to the keywords you are bidding on, Google penalizes you by charging you higher rates for each click.

Be smart, and don’t try to trick the search engines – it’s just not worth it!

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