I started a campaign for my content creation business website about two weeks ago and got some new clients from it, but then shut it down because I needed to hire more writers. I'm starting it back up again and I remember a friend of mine telling me that a solid CTR can help my position for keywords, even if I keep my bid price the same. What kind of CTR do I need for it to be considered quality and how many impressions will I need before I start not having to pay so much for clicks? Is a 2% CTR good? Also, is the quality rating different for each keyword, or do all the keywords combined affect one overall quality rating I get? Thanks for any help/input.
It's not CTR you have to look at, it's Quality Score. CTR is 65% of QS but it's calculated in relation to what other advertisers have achieved. So if the mean CTR for a keyword is 2%, a 3% CTR might get you a QS of 8. But if the mean is 4%, the same CTR might get you a QS of 5. Therefore, a 2% CTR is neither good nor bad. You have to compare it to what others have done and that's what QS is all about. QS is calculated at the keyword-ad level. There's more in the Adwords FAQ.
Thanks for the info. I'll be reading through the FAQ for a bit, but I was wondering if Google also factors in your position on the page. For example, if you're at the top, you are going to get more clicks per impressions, so is that also factor in to your Quality Score. Thanks for the help man, and if the answer to that question is in the FAQ, just let me know and I'll just learn about that when I get to it.
As you'll read in the FAQ, Google does take position into account to calculate QS because CTR is heavily dependent on your position as you said. This means you can have any QS at any position. It also means that whatever your QS is in say 10th position, it will be the same in first.