For many PPC campaigns out there, a factor that will determine just how successful a campaign is at gaining conversions at an affordable price will be the click through rate that is achieved from the PPC search advert. The click through rate (CTR) not only provides a campaign the ability to gain lots of traffic (or not a lot of traffic), but it can also help with other areas of a campaign, such as keeping the CPC low through increasing the quality score. For this reason, there are definately valid reasons to want to increase your CTR. For me, knowing I have a strong CTR gives the impression that the majority of traffic wants to click onto the advert because they find it interesting, concurring with the fact that I have good targeting for my campaign. With this, here are some ways you can increase the CTR of your paid search adverts.

#1 Implement Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are a great way to increase your CTR for a number of reasons:

1. They increase the area of your advert, providing your advert with more exposure time with the web user.
2. They ‘push’ competitor adverts down the page, sometimes below the fold, reducing the level of competition for clicks (if you rank above them, that is).
3. Ad extensions provide more information that works to get the web user more interested in the advert and more likely to click onto it.

After all, Google likes it when adverts get clicked because they get a proportion of the money of the CPC. Therefore, when they introduced ad extensions, they did it with the idea that it will increase the CTR of adverts. For this reason, you might as well use them then!
The only thing with this is in understanding what ad extension/s is/are best for your campaign. If you are unsure, the first step you could do is automate Google’s ad extensions, which allows Google to determine when to show certain ad extensions with your website and which ones at that too.

#2 Make Your URL ‘domain.com/keywords’

The URL seems to be a neglected part of the search advert mainly because it is not critical in gaining a good CTR when compared to other parts of the advert, such as the title or description. However, a bad URL can still hinder the performance of an advert.

For this reason, if you are unsure what to put for your URL, it is a wise choice to adopt a ‘domain.com/keywords’ approach where ‘domain’ is your actual domain name and ‘keywords’ are 1-3 keywords which the web user searched for. In Google AdWords, you can make the URL section whatever you want. However, if you make the domain name different to your actual domain name, you may cause the web user to get confused about how to access your website directly.

From doing this will make the domain the web user thinks they are going to land onto seem much more contextual to what they searched for, giving them more reason to click onto your advert.