[CTR or Click-Through Rate] When getting the click is what matters most

Sam Smith

Ecommerce Consultant at Doofinder

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One of the most famous ads from Pirelli was the one featuring track and field star Carl Lewis in fabulous red heels.

The tagline was “Power is nothing without control”.

This sentence became famous, but it wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact without the photo. If you don’t have your client’s attention, there’s no marketing campaign in the world that can work.

All that effort will be in vain.

This applies to ads both offline and online. We need our campaigns to have an impact so that viewers… click on the ad.

The CTR or click-through rate is the number of clicks that an ad gets (although it’s a metric used in other fields) and, by and large, what determines how successful an ad is.

Do you want to know what this KPI is? Or how to optimize it to drive more clients to your product cards or categories?

If so, then it’s high time you started reading. 😉

CTR or Click-Through Rate: what it is and what it’s for

Let’s see the official definition:

CTR or Click-Through Rate is the percentage of users that have clicked on your link in relation to the number of times that the ad has been shown.

This metric is primarily used in three fields:

• Advertising: in order to measure the effectiveness of a campaign.
• Web positioning: the CTR of a title (the title of the post that is shown when searching on Google) is one of the most important metrics for the search engine.
• Email marketing: in order to calculate how your call to action is working.

You see a ton of ads and search for loads of information on Google every day, but which results do you really end up clicking on?

The more attractive your ad or title is, the more clicks it will receive, and Google will reward you more and more. That’s why it’s so important to improve your CTR.

How is the CTR calculated?

Both the formula and the concepts are quite simple.

Imagine that you started a campaign on Google (this post explains how to do it in a few easy steps) and your ad contains a link to the product card you’re currently promoting.

Let’s say that the ad has been seen 5,000 times: this is the number of impressions of your campaigns.

From those 5,000 times that it’s been seen, 250 people clicked on the link and reached the product card in your online shop.

What’s the CTR in this case?

The number of times that people clicked (250) divided by the total number of times that it was seen (5,000) times 100 to get a percentage.

CTR = (clicks / impressions) x 100

Easy, right?

Let’s go a bit further.

The importance (or lack thereof) of CTR in advertising

As you can see, this value is important because it helps you figure out if your message is relevant to your audience (since clicking means they are obviously interested).

In our previous example, we calculated a CTR of 5%.

So now, the big question:

Is 5% high or low? Is it a good result or could it be improved?

The answer to that question is a huge “it depends”.

We can’t evaluate it in such general terms because it depends on many different factors:

• The platform where it’s been published (Google, Facebook, Pinterest…)
• The volume of the target audience and the segmentation carried out.
• The investment in this campaign.
• The competitors vying for clicks with the same types of ads.
• The sector or market to which the campaign is directed.
• And on, and on, and on…

However, the company WordStream, after analyzing thousands of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads from different sectors, established some data that could help guide you when the time comes to start measuring the CTR of your e-commerce ad campaigns:

• Google AdWords Average CTR: 2%
• Facebook Ads Average CTR: 0.90%

Despite this study, establishing an average measure of success to define what a good CTR is can be rather risky.

And also, you have to take into account a very important idea:

A high CTR doesn’t mean sales.

Logically, if the campaign is well thought out, increasing the number of clicks on the ad will translate into more sales – but that may not be the case.

If the keyword that you choose, the ad, and the landing page (be it a product card or post) are not properly connected, you won’t make any sales.

Here you have a simple example. Imagine the following situation:

• You decide to use “running shoes for women” as your keyword.
• You write “50% off on running shoes for women” on your ad.

But when a user clicks and goes to your website, they don’t see any discount on the shoes (just the product card), so they think there’s no discount and decide to leave.

This is why, in addition to the CTR, you have to measure other metrics in your campaigns in order to know if the strategy is working well globally. In this case, the ROI or return on investment.

How to increase the CTR of your marketing campaigns

While there is no specific value to measure the exact efficacy of a CTR, it’s pretty obvious that the higher the value is, the better.

Why? Easy.

• The more clicks your ad has, the more chances of conversions or purchases.
• The higher the percentage is, the more potentially interested clients there are as a result of your campaign.

In general:

Your main goal must be to increase the CTR.

And in order to do that, we’ve provided the following guide with actions and strategies that will help to make your campaigns – both AdWords and Facebook Ad – more efficient.

IMPORTANT

If you also want to know more about SEO-friendly writing and how to increase the CTR of your posts to increase your positioning on Google, this is the post for you.

1. CTR for Google AdWords: how to improve it

Having a good CTR percentage means having high-quality ads, which means:

• Better positioning
• More efficient campaigns
• Decreasing the price per click that you pay and the necessary budget to obtain the same amount of interaction

For Google AdWords, CTR is essential to assess the level of quality, something that has a strong impact on the price paid per click and the position in which your ad is shown.

According to Google, having a high level of quality means that their system thinks your ads, keywords, and landing page are relevant and useful for users.

So, if you want to meet all of those requirements, you’ll find it quite useful to carry out the following.

A. Use extensions (leveling up your ads)

An easy but effective way of improving your campaign’s CTR on AdWords is to use extensions.

As the name implies, it’s about “extending” your ad by offering extra information about the product or your shop. In addition, since this additional information is located at the bottom of the ad, the ad is bigger, so it catches people’s attention more.

Have a look at the following example.

B. Decide when it shouldn’t be shown

Or, even better, establish keywords for which you don’t want your ad to be shown (what we call negative keywords).

This will help your ads to be better segmented so that the traffic that reaches your URL (the page where users land) will be more qualified traffic.

C. Modify the visible URL

Google allows you to change the URL that is shown so that you can use other words.

Why is this useful?

Because it allows you to add a CTA or other words that can catch a user’s attention and encourage that precious click.

Have a look at the following image:

Look at how they modified the URL to use capital letters to make it stand out among competitors even though the real URL is a different one.

2. Facebook Ads: design the perfect campaign

The other advertising giant on the Internet is Facebook.

The most powerful feature Facebook offers in terms of marketing is its segmentation capabilities since you can show ads only to those who follow you.

You have all the details about that tool in this post.

But just remember this one important idea:

Facebook rewards ads with more visibility (with the highest CTR) by decreasing the cost and increasing its visibility.

Which is even more of a motivator to work on increasing CTR, isn’t it?

So let’s do it!

A. Use copywriting and images wisely

There are many companies advertising their products on Facebook, so you need to stand out among the crowd.

Good copywriting can help increase your conversion by 30%, as we mentioned in the post.

You need to catch potential clients’ attention from the very first second and a good combination of words along with optimized images is the killer combination.

• The text has to be concise, attractive, and relevant to your audience.
• The image must be clear, coherent with the content, and eye-catching.

Extra trick: Facebook is showing favoritism to posts with a videos uploaded directly to its platform (i.e., not through an external link to YouTube or Vimeo). Keep that in mind and create ads with videos instead of images.

(And don’t worry if you don’t have the slightest clue about making videos – we explain it step by step here so you can become the Spielberg of the Internet).

B. Always use a CTA or Call To Action

Ads that advise users about what to do work better than those that only offer information.

Don’t miss the chance to make it easy for your potential buyers: you need to add a one-click buying option.

You can do that by adding a CTA button to your ad telling them to Buy, Sign Up, or See More.

Have a look at this ad from Hawkers, an e-commerce that’s had incredible success with Facebook Ads.

It’s super easy to add a CTA button to your ads on Facebook because the Business Manager itself offers several options.

Write this down: the CTA buttons with the highest CTR on Facebook are Buy and See More, in other words, the most concrete and direct options.

Are you ready for the CTR of your e-commerce and its ads to skyrocket?

You know what it represents. You know how important it is. And you know how to increase it. That mean it’s time to start working on getting your CTR to optimal levels.

It’s one of the easiest metrics to measure and to increase, so what are you waiting for?

Let’s CTR! 😉