With smart pricing in Adwords for non-search ads, as an publisher, is CTR the right metric to optimize for to get the most out of a click?
Conversion rate, cost per click, and click-through rate are three major metrics to gauge the success of or to improve a pay per click campaign. Most advertisers don’t look at these metrics correctly or get sucked into the belief that they’re interdependent. These metrics should be treated separately for increasing the profitability of a campaign. How they should be treated depends on the profitability of the campaign’s keyword-ad-landing page combinations.
CTR has no influence on your earnings per click. The factors that determine whether you get smart priced are the conversion rate and consequently the ROI (return of investment) for the advertiser. Once the ROI sinks to a critical amount google will counteract it by lowering the price of the ads. CTR does not influence the conversion rate and consequently does not have any effect.