Posted by Justin Dupre on Dec 8, 2008

3 Steps to Take to Increase Your AdWords CTR

Categories: Featured Articles, Internet Marketing | 1 comment

Google AdWords is a tough beast to manhandle, and it’s users can be equally difficult to control. If pulled one way incorrectly and given one little slip-up, you could see yourself losing a large amount of cash if not spotted soon enough. This goes, as well, for Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.

One thing that can help you stop losing money, increase your quality score, and lower click costs is to increase your CTR, or your click through rate. Click through rate is the percentage of users who see your ad on the search page vs. those that actually click the ad. The more clicks you get, generally, the better your QS and click costs will be.

So, how can we increase your ad CTR?

Add in the Keyword

It is time consuming to write out individual ad copies for each keyword you’ve got, but it is really something you should have the patience to do if you want to make it any where in the internet marketing field. Adding your keyword in the headline, as well as either one of the first two lines of the ad copy will greatly increase CTR.

I will ussually run 2 different general ads across about 1000 keywords when starting a new campaign. These get very low CTR and I expect it. This is just a test to see whether I’m targeting the right keywords and if my campaign has some potential to make money or not. When I see that it might work out for me, I toss out the crappier ad and I will go through each converting keyword and write an individually targeted ad with the keyword in the headline and ad copy. I’ll ussually see a few percent increase over the general ad in terms of click through rate.

Symbols and Capitalization

In the white space of Google’s pretty boring search results‘ pages, there is a lot of white space and bland boring text. Your ads have to compete against all of this to catch the users attention. A normal tactic is to use capital letters at the beginning of every word. “I like to eat chicken” becomes “I Like To Eat Chicken”. Capital letters are easier to read and spot comparing them with the normal search results.

Using symbols are another easy way to grab the eyes attention. In the headline, use a question (another great CTR tactic) and end it with a question mark (duh). Add some excitement with an exclamation point. Use slashes and dollar signs all to separate your ads from the rest of the ads for any specific keyword. A trick I use is to add three periods at the end of my second line (…). This has gained me CTR increases as much as 1 – 3 percent! It plays with the users mind, as if they need to read the landing page to finish the sentence started in the AdWords ad copy.

3^rd – 4^th Ad Position

Honestly, you’ll get the best CTR rate in position #1 on Google. However, you’ll get a shit-ton amount of clicks within a short period of time that will exhaust your budget within hours of getting approved to run. The click price will be extremely high, perhaps unbarable, as well. What I’ve found works best is aiming for 3rd or 4th position in the sponsored ads lists. This puts my ads right above the search results, or to the direct right of this. This will give me a higher CTR than other positions, and a lower click cost than the 1^st position.

Steps you can take to increase CTR certainly aren’t limited to these 3 things. The key to maximum profit is continuous split testing and experimentation in all aspects of your campaigns. But who’s to say an increased CTR means more profits for you? If you increase CTR, but conversions decrease, you may have changed something you shouldn’t have. In the end, you should be basing your decisions not only on click through rate, but conversion rate for each variable of the split test, too. AdWords internet marketing can be time and money consuming, but when given enough love and attention, you can really hit a nail on the head and see huge dough in your pockets.