Maximising the Click Through Rate

How do you write an advert that people notice in a busy results page, and then feel inclined to click on? You absolutely can’t mislead them - you’re paying for every click, but only make money if they buy something.Back when we were discussing how to set up your campaign, I suggested the following ways to improve your click through rate:

Put the search term in your advert. In the title is best, but you can also try the body or the URL.
Try Dynamic Keyword Insertion to make the search seem more relevant to the searcher.
Constantly test new adverts against the existing ones - Google’s got the functionality, so use it.

Here are some more, general points to bear in mind.

These are all suggestions, and nothing will work 100% of the time. Testing is the only way to know what works for you. And there are probably 100 more ways to make an advert work. I’ve heard suggestions that repeating the same keywords on every line, at the start of the first and third lines, and the end of the second line (to create an arrow) has worked for some people, though I’ve not had much success with this myself.

Just remember the one golden rule of adverts - don’t sacrifice your conversion rate in order to improve your click through rate, unless you are very sure that you know what you’re doing. Consider the following advert, that’s working quite well:

Digital Cameras
All The Information You Need
Choose With Confidence
www.stevescameras.com

It’s delivering the following results per week:

Impressions: 		10,000
Clicks: 		500
Conversions: 		25
Cost Per Click: 	£0.30
Profit Per Conv:	£30.00
Total Profit: 		£600

You decide to try a new advert, to improve conversion rates:

Cheap Digital Cameras
Lowest Prices On The Internet
Amazing Range, Fast Delivery

Your cameras are reasonably priced, and your range is quite good, but this is not going to be good for your conversion rate. It’ll help your click through rate, though.

Here’s what happens:

Impressions: 		10,000
Clicks: 		700
Conversions: 		28
Cost Per Click: 	£0.30
Profit Per Conv:	£30.00
Total Profit: 		£630

Your click through rate increased from 5% to 7%, but your conversion rate fell from 5% to 4%. Overall, this actually made you more money. But it could have worked out very differently:

Impressions: 		10,000
Clicks: 		1000
Conversions: 		26
Cost Per Click: 	£0.30
Profit Per Conv:	£30.00
Total Profit: 		£480

Here, the click through rate increased from 5% to 10%, and the conversion rate fell from 5% to 2.6%. This time, it didn’t work.

So, is this worth testing? On paper, you’d have to say yes, since the risk of losing money for a week or two (if it doesn’t work) is far outweighed by the benefit of making more money for years going forward (if it does work).

What’s the problem? How long does it take to spot a change in the click through rate? At these levels of traffic, a few days perhaps. But the conversion rate will take a lot longer. If your conversion rate is approx. 5%, it’ll take 20 times as long to see if a difference is real or not. So you can either run 20 tests on your click through rate, or one looking at your conversion rate. Which is going to yield a bigger benefit in the long run?

So, I’d suggest that you look at changing the target for your adverts only very occasionally. The rest of the time, you should just look to improve the click through rate, being careful that you aren’t drawing in a different type of customer.

In summary, be very careful when trying words like “Cheap”, “Quality” - they will change the type of people clicking on your advert, and you’ll need to be much more careful when analysing the results.

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 7:10 pm.

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