What makes a successful PPC campaign? For some advertisers, having a cost effective PPC campaign that simply gains as much traffic as possible will deem it as a success. For most, the cost per conversion is usually what settles whether a campaign is a success or not. For some advertisers, though, the CTR of their PPC advert is what they feel is one of, if not the, most important statistic of their PPC campaign because a high CTR means the traffic is contextual, genuinely interested, likely to convert after clicking and enables the campaign to adapt its traffic flow easily. For this reason, here are some ways you can help to improve your AdWords advert’s click through rate.

#1 Location of Advert Needs to be High

The first and easiest way to increase your advert’s CTR is to make sure at the very least your advert is placed number one or two for the desired search phrase your campaign is targeting on search engine results. This is because the top spot of search results advertising tend to get the highest CTR as that is where many web users first look.

Of course, this does mean you might have to increase your maximum cost per click (CPC) to achieve top spot. However, if you are tight on a budget, you can take a different approach to getting top spot: niche keywords. Not only are niche keywords going to decrease the CPC you use to bid in general, the low competition means you are likely to get top spot too.

#2 Keep Your Advert on the Same Topic

I have seen far too many adverts (such as in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign‘ series) that have either had:

• Adverts that are unrelated to the search phrase/keywords they are bidding and appearing for.
• Adverts where the title of the advert is unrelated to the description of the advert.

In each case, this will result in a low click through rate because either 1) the advert is unrelated to what the web user searching wants to find or 2) if the advert is vague and unrelated to each other, the web user will become unsure whether to click onto the advert because they will be unsure what type of landing page they will land on to. For this reason, always make sure your advert is specifically advertising one thing and one thing only and make sure all the efforts on all aspects of the campaign are focused on that ‘one thing’ (I know ‘one thing’ is vague but I am sure you get the gist).

At the end of the day, if you really want to improve your advert’s CTR and are unsure how to even with the two above points, the best thing to do is set up some identical campaigns on a low budget and experiment changing one variable at a time such as keywords and the advert to see how that affects your advert’s CTR. What you will find is that after a few weeks or so, you will see that certain things in your advert (such as a CTA) might help to increase the CTR whereas other things (such as too much content) is hindering the performance of it.