CTR and effectiveness of adverts

I'm an Adwords newbie and need some more guidance on some things please.

I've recently revamped our Adwords and set up new groups and catagorised certain sections for us and I thought it would help a lot more but we don't seem to have had much improvement on things. We're fairly lucky in that we don't have that many competitors compared to industries such as web design or car things which is making me wonder why we don't get an even higher CTR. The total CTR of our ads is less than 1% - is this normal or am I doing something terribly wrong?

Our average position is 4 and I've always assumed that being on the first page is the main thing but now I'm thinking I need to be number 1 all the time - is that correct or is the first page generally good enough.

Also, I'm not sure I have enough keywords, I only have about 60 overall. I think I need to be upping that using more exact matches and phrase matching. I have negative words already but perhaps better research is needed in to this, thankfully our site has an excellent stat function. What I wouldn't give to view our competitors Adwords campaign

 

a CTR of less than 1% (assuming you're not talking abou the content network) is pretty dismal.

That said, if your converting at an acceptable level I wouldn't worry too much about CTR.

 

Your conversion rate is king, but if you just want to increase your CTR you probably need to work on your writing better ad copy and tightening down your keywords. Also consider getting more specific keywords and writing individual ads for those. You can get a list of keywords users are searching to find your website in Google Analytics. Check out the resources below to confirm you are already using these methods.

Improve Your Click Through Rate

Choose Your Keyword Matching Options

It sounds like there is definitely some room for improvement on your CTR, but if you're happy with your conversion rate things aren't so bad.

 

The conversion rate is fine, although more is always welcomed. I think the main issue is though, out of all our competitors, if were listed top 5 and getting less than 1%, someone is getting a healthy chunk somewhere along the line.

Will check out those links, thanks

 

Google tracks a record of your ad campaigns. From observation it is noticed that if you edit your ad many times, some how it gives negative result with google. Your ad might be much better in copy writing terms after editing. But still if you edit an ad many times it does n't seems to improve position. Start a new campaign with your most effective ad (in copy writing techniques), and try not to edit many times. It can improve ad positon and hence the CTR.

 

Wow, that wins the award for made up statement of the day

Editing an ad does not "give negative result with Google".

 

"They only reason Google will ever 'look into' your ad again, is if you change the Display URL. Even if you amend the Adcopy, change individual keyword destination url and stuff, your QS will not be affected."

(quoted from a PPC expert during a teleseminar)

To improve your CTR%, you really need to delve into the mind of the searcher, for each keyword/ad group.

Eg: you are selling High resolution digital camera. What will the searcher be looking for? Probably..

1) Quality
2) Warranty
3) Tech support?

So your ad might go along this line.. (just a hypothetical example,

High Resolution Digicams
8.2 Mega Pixels. 24/7 Support.
2 Year Money Back Guarantee.


That should (theoretically) give you a rather decent CTR, as you have addressed what the searcher might be thinking of.. instead of price (people searching for High resolution camera don't usually care about price, much )

Eg:

High Resolution Digicams
Dirt Cheap Digital Cameras.
Only $397 - Save Up To 65%.

So yeah, thats just a very random example. Always try to go into the mind of the searcher and understand his psychology. Then, shape your ad that addresses his issues and you should be ok.

 

There are a lot of reasons why you may have a low clickthrough rate...

1) You've still got the content network selected - check your campaign settings if you aren't sure.

2) You are bidding on keywords that people would use when searching for a number of things. For example, I was advertising a meningitis testing kit a while back, and bidding on "meningitis" got a lot of impressions, but the clickthrough rate wasn't too clever - most people just wanted information...

3) Your advert is boring, or just blends into the others. It's not that uncommon - try searching for PPC Management, or Personal Injury Compensation, and you'll see that most of the adverts are the same. Search on www.google.com/adpreview for your keywords, and see whether your advert is jumping off the page.

4) Are your competitors advertising their prices, or free delivery, or some other benefit? Are you? If not, that may be putting people off.

Here are a few more tips on writing adverts to improve your clickthrough rate:

http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/...advert-text/maximising-the-click-through-rate

 

Thanks for the advise everyone, it's certainly food for thought and has given me plenty to be getting on with. I thought our adverts were ok but I'll tweak them and see how it goes. I think I'll also set up some more campaigns and try the best performing ads separately in a week or so - currently we have all our ads under one single campaign - not sure this is a good idea or not.

I did have the content network selected, I assume that I was correct in unticking the box? That's where we appear on relevant sites (that use Adsense?) isn't it? Don't really want to concentrate on that, I think we are better off on the search engine only.

 

That's the cause of your low clickthrough rate. I'd suggest running a report to look at the clickthrough rate of just the search network, and see what your 'real' clickthrough rate was...

In general, I think it's a good idea to get your search network working well before trying the content network (though I do have one campaign that only works on the content network).

 

Thanks for the advise everyone, it's certainly food for thought and has given me plenty to be getting on with. Your conversion rate is king, but if you just want to increase your CTR you probably need to work on your writing better ad copy and tightening down your keywords.