Pay per click advertising’s whole platform works predominantly around search adverts – the adverts that appear above organic search results from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Bing and more (but, mainly, Google). Learning how to optimize such adverts to produce the best performance, be it in terms of a high click through rate (CTR) or maximum exposure can be a tricky task, to say the least, if you do not know where to start. For this reason, here are some tips you can use to improve your search advert to gain a better CTR and maximum exposure.
 
 

To Increase CTR…

The click through rate of your advert will be dependant on the exposure level the advert gets. However, it will also be dependant on making sure your advert satisifies the web user enough for them to want to click onto the advert. This could be achieved through a few ways:

• Limiting content. Having lots of content for the web user to read through in an advert will inherently reduce the CTR, due to the fact the attention-span of something online is low, where the ‘next best thing’ is always a scroll or click away.
• Implementing 1-2 call to actions (CTAs). CTAs are great since they provide direction as to what you want the web user to do, which usually results in the action being a click on the advert.
• Site link ad extension. Generally, the more links the web user has available to click on, the more likely they are to click onto one of the links (within reason, of course). From implementing the site link ad extension, you are providing more paths for the web user to click onto, which will help to increase the CTR of your advert.

To Increase Exposure…

You may want to increase the exposure mainly for one of two reasons – an advert with more exposure is more likely to get clicked on as well as the fact an advert with more exposure will generally make a larger impact to the web user (since they are more likely to remember the advert even if they chose not to click onto it). To increase the exposure of a search advert:

• Use more ad extensions. Ad extensions are a great way to increase exposure due to the fact they increase the area that your advert takes up. This has the effect of making your advert larger to the web user, as well as pushing other adverts down, potentially below the fold of the web page (if you have a CPC that has meant you rank above competitor adverts).
• Have a content heavy title. The description is not generally a place that gets lots of exposure. The main brunt of exposure comes with the title and what is mentioned in the title. This makes it clear that a title with more content will grab more attention, increasing exposure further.