How to Get 20-30% CTR on Search Network - Part 1

Hello, I know this is my first post but I've been playing the internet marketing game for quite some time. Anyway, I'm updating one of my products and thought "why not post this online so other people can read it". Now before some of you start bashing me for my peon status, I should let you know that I have almost a decade of experience advertising on Google AdWords.

Also, I titled this "Part 1" because this is just touching the surface of things to do to increase your CTR and quality score. I'll make some other posts later detailing more ways to increase CTR. Keep in mind that I copied and pasted this directly from my product, so some of the wording may seem weird for a forum. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

Search Network Quality Score is All About Click Through Rates
While Google claims your quality score is based on many factors, the biggest factor is CTR (not counting website relevance). In the countless years I’ve been advertising on Google, I’ve learned that everything you do to increase your CTR is actually on par with what Google wants you to do to increase your CTR. This section will go over how to make sure you’re getting the highest CTR possible for your keywords. If you don't agree with me on this, then show me a keyword with a two-plus month CTR history of 15%+ and a quality score of less than 7/10.

Think You Have A High CTR?
I hear many people brag about how their CTR is 2% or sometimes as high as 5%. If you think that’s high, don’t worry because I too at one point thought a 1% CTR meant I was in the safe zone and I wouldn’t have any quality score issues as long as I was at least at 1% CTR. I hate to break it to you, but a 1% CTR is horrible and a CTR of 3-5% is decent at best. Here’s a way to think about it. If you have a 1% CTR it means that out of every 100 searches only one person thinks your ad is what they want. You may be thinking, yeah, but that’s not too bad…well think about it this way: out of every 100 searches 99 people tell Google that they do not want your product/service.

With that being said, here are my general rules on click through rates:

• Less than 1% CTR – You will soon have a quality score issue with this keyword. Your bids will not be high enough for first page placements.

• 1% – 3% CTR – Your keyword will most likely hover in the 5/10-7/10 range, but you will never benefit from quality score benefits. Your bids will almost be in range for first page placements.

• 3% – 6% CTR – You are in the Safe Zone. You will have a CTR of 7/10 (if not now then within a month or so) and you will have a few quality score benefits. Your bids will place you on the first page.

• 6% – 10% CTR – You have a pretty good quality score 7/10 – 10/10. You will notice what you pay for your bids are noticeably less than your max bid. Your first page bid will be below your max bid.

• 10% – 20% CTR – You have a perfect quality score of 8/10 – 10/10. You will notice that you pay much less for your clicks than your max bid. Your first page bids will be a few cents usually.

• 20% + CTR – Your quality score will always be a 10/10. You will usually pay half (or less) per click than your max bid states. Your first page bids will be $0.01. You will notice surges in traffic as Google will show your ad 100% of the time usually above the search results because you are exceeding Google’s CTR expectations and your ad is considered highly relevant.

Now with the above being posted, you should be able to clearly get an idea of where you stand with quality scores. Also, you should use this for your keyword CTR (don’t use the above comparison for your campaign, text ad, or adgroup CTRs). In case you’re wondering what my quality scores are, my campaign average is 8% for 500,000 impressions and my highest keywords (with over 100+ impressions) are 30%+ CTR.


How to Get High CTRs
This section will tell you how to get incredibly high CTRs. Before you start implementing some of these strategies, you should know that not every keyword is capable of receiving a CTR of 10%-30%+. Some keywords are so broad (such as dog training) that people will be searching it trying to find information for a variety of things (which is why not all of my keywords are 20% CTR). But these techniques will definitely allow you to get your CTR high enough to achieve high quality scores and low bids.

Advertise in One Country At a Time
Does your campaign target more than one country? If so, you’re hurting your CTR. People in different countries search differently. They use different words, different keywords, different currency symbols, and a different grammar/vocabulary structure. The first thing you need to do to start increasing your CTR is to target one country in your campaign. What if you are targeting two countries in your campaign? If you’re targeting two countries, download AdWords Editor and duplicate your campaign. Then target your new (duplicated) campaign to one country (and only that country) and target your old campaign to the better performing country. So if you were advertising in the USA and Canada and you received more sales in the USA, then create the new campaign to target Canada. If you’re concerned that doing this will negatively effect your quality score, it might, but it will only be temporary. Usually it will only negatively effect your quality score if your account already contains several low quality scores. If you’re concerned about it negatively effecting your quality score, then simply copy over your best performing adgroups to the new campaign, this way you will start off with the best chances. Your quality scores will not be effected in your old campaign, only the new one (if they are effected at all). Usually the new campaign’s quality scores will begin to rise in a week or so because of the increase CTR performance your account will see from doing this and a few of the other techniques mentioned in this section.

Stop Your Ads from Showing When People Don’t Click On them
Do you have your ads running 24 hour per day? If you don’t know the answer to this, then your ads are running 24 hours per day (as long as you’re not hitting your daily budget). There is no need for you to advertise your product 24 hours per day. I know, you’re probably thinking “but I’ve made sales at every time of the day”. Yes, I do too, but every product will have at least 1-5 hours where search interest is very low and those hours have the lowest CTR and the lowest sales. Those “low search interest” hours are also pulling down your average CTR for the day. For example, the hours 0-5 have a CTR of 3%, the hours 6-14 have a CTR of 10%, and the hours 15-24 have a CTR of 8%. To increase your average CTR you would want to tell Google to stop displaying your ads during the hours 0-5. Surprisingly, this will usually increase your profits, because you’re not paying for uninterested visitors during those hours. To see what times of the day receive the highest/lowest CTR use your dimension reports. To tell Google when to show your ads use Ad Scheduling.

Stop Your Ads from Showing Where People Are Not Interested
Not everyone in the country(s) you’re advertising in will be interested in what you’re advertising. So the first step in preventing these people from seeing your ads (and from bringing down your CTR) is to prevent your ads from showing in their area. To do this, run a dimensions report at the region/city/metro level to find the locations with the lowest CTR. Make a list of all the locations that are performing lower than average. When done, go to your campaign settings and exclude those specific locations (states, cities, metro-areas, etc.) from your targeted locations. At this point you may be thinking that you’re excluding a lot of potential traffic, which could cut into your profits. If you feel this way, think of it this way – you’re preventing your ads from being displayed to people who have little interest in your product (if they had an interest in it, you would have a higher CTR), people will little interest in your product do not usually purchase the product. So you’re not removing valuable traffic sources, instead you’re weeding out the visitors that cost you money (by clicking on your ad and not buying) and hurt your CTR (by searching and not clicking on your ads).

Get Rid of Low Performing Keywords
I know this step may be a bit painful, but you will need to get rid of (pause) all the keywords within your account that are performing poorly. You will, eventually, re-add them to your campaign when your account as a whole is performing better. But at the moment, keywords that are active and performing poorly within your campaign are building up a poor performance history and are decreasing your account’s overall performance. In my experience, by pausing these keywords and re-adding them into a new AdGroup in a week or two when your campaign is performing better, they will gradually start increasing in CTR. If the keywords have been performing poorly in your account for quite some time, it will take them longer to increase CTR and quality score. By getting rid of these keywords you will increase the overall health of your campaign which will increase the chances of all the new keywords you add to your account to immediately start off at higher quality scores.

Turn Low-Performing Broad Match Keywords into Broad-Match Modifier Keywords
Broad match keywords are good to have, but if your campaign is performing poorly and you have low quality score keywords within your account, the chances are that your broad match keywords are not targeted enough to benefit from them. Yes, they give you more traffic, but the reason they do is because they show your ad on a variety of searches. For example a broad match keyword “stink bug” could potentially show ads for smelly bug, insects that smell, etc. So, what you want to do now is to look for broad match keywords that are performing poorly and create broad-match modifier keyword variations to replace those keywords. This will cut into your impressions, but it will significantly increase your CTR because your ads will start appearing on more relevant searches.

Find and Stop Non-Relevant Search Queries from Displaying Your Ads
If you use broad match (even broad-match modifier) and phrase match keywords, the chances are that they are triggering your ads to be displayed on search queries that are not 100% relevant towards the product you’re promoting. A simple way to test this is to go to your “Keywords” tab and click on the “See search terms” button and select “All”. Then scroll to the bottom of the list of search queries your ads are being displayed on and you will see a cumulative average. If your average CTR is less than 1% it means that your ads are being shown on a lot of irrelevant searches. To stop your ads from showing on these searches, look through the list of search queries that have triggered your ad and tick the check box to the left of each search query that is not relevant towards that particular AdGroup. Then when you’re done, click on the button to exclude these keywords from your AdGroup. Then go back through the list and tick all the search queries that re not relevant towards the product you’re promoting and exclude these from the campaign (this will exclude these search queries from triggering your ads in all your adgroups within that campaign).

Make Sure Each AdGroup Has At Least Two Text Ads
If your text ad is horrible, you’re only going to be able to go so far with increasing your CTR. You will need to make sure your text ad itself is attracting clicks. To do this you need to split test different text ads. Thankfully Google does this automatically for you. If you have more than one text ad in an AdGroup, Google will run them both and by checking back every week or so you should get an idea of which one is the best performing text ad. When it’s clear which one performs better (has a higher CTR), pause the poor performing text ad and re-write the better performing text ad (try to make it a little better, test out different words/structure, add/leave out punctuation, etc.). Do this for all your AdGroups and re-check your text ads once every week to two weeks (depending on how much traffic you receive) so you can make sure your not running a low performing text ad half the time. I would say to test more text ads, but that can take a lot longer to determine the winner (especially if you receive less than 1,000 clicks per day) so I now recommend testing no more than 2-3 ads per adgroup.

Use Negative Keyword Match Types
When adding negative keywords to your campaign/adgroup, make sure you’re using the proper match type. For example, the negative keyword -[dog training] will only prevent your ads from showing when someone’s search query is exactly “dog training”, the negative keyword -”dog training” will only prevent your ad from showing when someone’s search query contains the words “dog training” next to each other, the negative keyword -dog training will only prevent your ad from showing when someone’s search query contains both words dog and training. Normally, I recommend making single word negative keywords broad match, 2-3 word negative keywords phrase match, and 4+ word negative keywords exact match.

Feel free to post any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them and to elaborate on anything I posted.

 

i like using long tailer keywords.

 

good article.

 

nice post i like your post and tecniques to increase the ctr according to me the keyword is responsible to increase ctr.

 

nice article for ppc

 

Very good post. I'm waiting for part 2

 

QUOTE

• 10% – 20% CTR – You have a perfect quality score of 8/10 – 10/10. You will notice that you pay much less for your clicks than your max bid. Your first page bids will be a few cents usually.

Great post but I disagree with you on the sentence above.
High Quality Score (8-10) is achieved when, among other things, your relative CTR is high.
If 4-5 competitors (on the Ad Group's keyword) have higher CTRs then the Quality Score can be low.

Bottom line: there's always room for improvement, even if the CTR seems high

 

My apologies, I see a typo. I meant to say "You have a near perfect quality score".

Yes, I agree. In my experience (not counting keyword relevancy) Quality Score is mostly based on CTR. But even if you do have a high CTR you can still suffer a lower quality score if your competitor's are getting higher CTR's than you are on the same search queries. For example, if you have a 10% CTR on a keyword and all your competitor's have a 15% CTR on the same keyword, then your CTR while high compared to other keywords, is low on that specific search query.

There are several CTR factors that Google looks at to determine whether your CTR is high or not. Here are some of the one's that I know of:

• The CTR of your ads at a particular time of day

• The CTR of your ads in specific geographic regions

• The CTR of your ads at specific ad positions

• Whether or not you are using dynamic keyword insertion

Basically what the above list means is that Google understands that CTRs can change depending on time of day, location, ad rank, and DKI and Google uses that data to determine if your CTR is over-performing, under-performing, or average when compared to other ads.

 

looking forward the part 2

 

Nice post carry on...

 

Nice post , im looking more and more into adsense now after 10 years of organic success it seems logical to me to play both sides of the feild. Looking forward to part 2

 

Thanks for this man, I've been thinking about getting into Adwords again and this info is gonna help me out quite a bit.

 

Great Article..i have a doubt..i am using "phrase match" and [exact matches] only..that means my ads will trigger when some one searches the phrases(Both Exact and phrase match)..Is it important for me to use negetive keywords since i am no using broad keywords.?

 

Definitely, Negative keywords useful also when there are no Broad match keywords.
It can be also useful to add Modified Broad keywords (add a plus sign before each word for which you want to avoid synonyms being triggered).
Reason: the actual search terms users are using create a very colorful spectrum. It means you'll very likely to find new profitable keywords you haven't through of before. Yet it will cost you.

 

Thanks..suppose i am using keywords with phrase match like "dog training" in my adwords campaign. If i use - dog training my ads will not show when peoples search for keywords(phrase match) like "training dog" "how to train dog" etc but will show only for phrases like "how to dog training", "dog training methods" etc, Right?...if i am wrong please clarify a bit more..

 

I agree.
The issue with Broad match is that it triggers new search terms. And out of these new search terms, say, 10-20% are useful/profitable for the campaign, and the rest might be a waist of money. Problem is you can't separate the wheat from the shaft before you accumulate some data. There's no trick: you must invest in order to reap the fruits down the road.

 

Thanks for this sharing, i will be take an action

 

There r lots of factor to increasing CTR thorough adword. The most important factor are keyword and location.If you will put the most trafficable keywords according to your product and services that will increase your CTR.

 

Will try out some of these. Thx!

 

Great post, I didn't realize running my ads late at night would hinder my QS