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6 Easy Ways To Increase Your AdWords CTR

April 27, 2016

Setting up an AdWords account is relativity easy, however if you do not structure and manage it well enough you will probably be sat there wondering where all your traffic has gone, along with your sales or enquiries. One reason may be that the click through rate (CTR) of your ads is too low. So how do you improve your CTR? Here we are going to look at 6 easy ways to help you start improving your CTR and regaining that all important traffic.

  1. Use Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are an additional ad format that allow you to add extra information about your business within an ad and if they are not already, they should be a key addition to your account to help improve visibility and maximise CTR.

Sitelinks – A sitelink is an extra line of text that displays under your ad, you can use a sitelink to help steer a user towards a specific page on your website you believe to be relevant to their search. You can also add descriptions to your sitelinks which is a great way to make your ad stand out amongst the competition and will no doubt help increase your CTR.

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Callouts – Callouts enable you to use additional text within your ads and can be anything from information about your business to call to actions or anything you deem relevant. Again this is another addition that makes your ads stand out and being able to shout about your business is just another factor that will assist in improving your CTR. If you take a look at our example below, within our ad we are using callouts to shout about some areas of expertise that we offer to make the ad look more appealing to the eye and the audience.

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Structured Snippets – Structured snippets can be used to highlight aspects of your business such as the products you sell or the services you offer. Snippets help the user instantly find out a little more about your business before clicking the ad. If you look at our example below for an E-commerce site, you can see this snippet includes some of the brands of the products they sell.

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2. Capitalisation

 Make your ads look the part by using title case. It’s best practice and a well-known method when it comes to improving CTR. Which ad looks better? Think you will probably agree the first one looks a lot more appealing to the eye and would certainly get my vote.

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3. Offers

Sounds like a simple and obvious one but I’m sure I’d be surprised at the amount of businesses not shouting about their strongest offers. So let’s say you are an e-commerce site and you have an offer on? Let’s include this in your ads, if you don’t somebody else will and will no doubt be stealing the majority of the traffic. Having an offer within your text ad will make your ad stand out amongst the competition therefore leading to an increased CTR and conversions.

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4. Keywords In Display URL

This is a simple addition that I bet is well under-utilized. Using the display URL is a great way to add additional keywords to show relevancy towards the users search term. There are obviously examples where you may not feel the need to use them such as a homepage, but when we are talking generic or brand search terms you are doing more harm than good by not using them. If you take a look at the below example I made a search for the brand “Bio-D” here we can see an ad from one of our clients that includes the brand keyword in the display URL. This straight away will jump out at any potential customer as it shows additional relevancy in line with the rest of the ad.

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5. Bids

Managing your bids is one of the most important factors when it comes to CTR. At the end of the day if your ad is not showing in a good position your CTR is going to plummet dramatically. Competition and CPCs are always changing and if you are not on top of your bid strategy your ads will slip and so will CTR and performance as a result.

6. Relevant Ad Groups

One massive way to help increase your CTR is by taking control of your ad groups and make sure you create tightly knit groups in relation to your keywords. Chances are if you have 30+ keywords in one ad group the ads in there are probably not going to be as relevant as they can be for all the search terms.

Solution to this is to create very tightly themed groups containing keywords and ads that are as relevant as possibly to each other. This will ensure than when a user makes a search and your ad appears, the ad is the most relevant it can be therefore helping to maximize CTR.

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The above tips should help your AdWords click through rates and overall performance, however it is important to understand that not everything will work for everyone so make sure you are constantly testing to see what works best for you!

Struggling with your AdWords performance? Why not get in touch and request a free audit today.