PPC - Pay Per Click Management

If you are looking to improve elements to your PPC campaign, such as your search advert, the first step is to understand what can affect the elements you want to improve. For example, if you want to improve a race car and make it faster, you need to understand what specifically can make a race car faster (or slower). The click through rate is an important statistic in PPC. It dictates how much traffic is exposed to your advert and clicks onto it. It makes clear how interested web users are in your advert and states how competitive your advert is to the competition. With this, here are the factors that can influence the CTR of a search advert in PPC.

Location

Where a search advert is located in paid search results has an impact to the CTR it achieves. As a general rule of thumb, the higher up the four spots of paid search, the better the CTR the advert will achieve. This is especially applicable with the 4th advert (out of 4), which gets dismissed many times due to being closest to the top of organic results.

Device Viewing

How adverts are displayed varies between devices, such as tablets, to computers to smartphones. Depending on what type of device web users are using will influence the CTR of your advert. The CTR tends to be the healthiest on computers/desktops, with smartphones coming in next, with tablets being the worst.

Time of Day

The time of the day is extremely important to the CTR an advert achieves – it is exactly the same reason why the time at which social posts are shared will influence the CTR those posts achieve. If you have your advert shown at 10pm-4am local time, don’t be surprised that the click through rate is not going to be as good as if you had it during normal daylight hours.

Content

This is a huge factor to the CTR. What your content is about and how you display it will greatly affect the choice for web users to click onto your advert or not. For this reason, look into grabbing attention headlines, whilst the use of ad extensions will never go unnoticed.

Competition

The adverts surrounding and near to your advert will impact the CTR of your advert. This is because there is now alternatives to click onto other than your advert. Taking this into consideration, it is important to know who your competition is, and what differentiates them, if anything at all, against yourself and your advert.