My last article in the ‘A Complete Explanation Of PPC’ series looked into depth at the CPC or Cost-Per-Click. In this article, I will be 
looking at the CTR in pay per click advertising and, with it, everything you ought to know about it so you can fully understand what the statistic means and how you should interpret it.
The CTR is an abbreviation for Click-Through Rate. Essentially, it is a value associated with how well your advert is at gaining clicks. The CTR is a percentage statistic which is the amount of clicks your advert gains divided by the amount of total impressions it has had. For example, if your advert has a CTR of 5%, for every 100 impressions your advert gains, you will get, on average, 5 clicks onto your advert.
The misconception that advertisers have with the CTR of their campaigns is that they generally think the higher the click-through rate is, the better it is for the campaign. This is true for some cases but false for others. It is true in the sense that a high CTR for a campaign will result in a better quality score. A better quality score for a campaign will mean it will be easier for that campaign to achieve a better or maintain their ad position at for a lower CPC.
On the other hand, remember what the CTR means. If it is higher, you will gain more clicks for impressions your advert gains. Therefore, if you have an extravagant CTR, this means:
- You will be gaining lots of clicks.
- Since you have to pay for each click, the cost of your campaign will increase.
- A high CTR is also increases the suspicion of why lots of people want to click on your advert. Are they actually interested in the advert itself or is there irrelevant traffic (with no likelihood of a conversion) going to your landing page?
- This also raises the point whether there is click fraud going on too.
This makes it clear that you should not always think a high CTR is going to always be beneficial to your campaign. Ideally, the only times you want a high CTR in PPC is when your keywords are both extremely contextual and relevant to the traffic you are bidding for and the CPC for the keyword is also inexpensive.
If you find that you want to improve your CTR because your campaign is not achieving the right results in the right amount of time, there are a few ways you can do this listed below:
- The advert itself – The advert is the first place your should look if you want to increase your CTR. There are many articles already on PPC.org which look at how you can improve your text and image adverts to adopt a better CTR through means of including a call to action and more.
- The keywords – Your CTR will be affected by who is looking at your campaign. Therefore, it is a good idea to try and eliminate as much irrelevant traffic from seeing your advert as possible with negative keywords while also placing keywords into your campaign that will bring the right type of traffic to your advert (that is interested in it’s contents).
