Many digital marketers know a lot about CTR and many business owners who are involved in the digital marketing implementation for their business also would have come across about this and here is a quick brainstorm for both Digital marketers and business owners on what is CTR and How it can be improved.

Definition of CTR:

The spelled out version of CTR is click-through rate and CTR is its abbreviation.

CTR is nothing but a metric or number of people clicking on your website URL/AD against the number of people have seen it.

To put it in a simple way CTR=Number of visits to the website/Number of people seen the ad

CTR= (Clicks/Impressions) %*100 eg: (100/1000)%*100= 10%

When your website pops up on search results for the search query it will be eligible for an impression and hence Number of searches for which your ad appeared is the number of impressions a website/ad copy will acquire.

So from the above definition, it’s clear that more the number of clicks over impressions more is the CTR, CTR, and Clicks(Traffic) to the website are directly proportional and hence,

Drop in CTR is a drop in traffic!

So, taking measures to improve the CTR is crucial, CTR is the first thing after impressions to be considered to understand the progress of the website in terms of its traffic/visitor performance.

A digital marketers success depends on the CTR and hence a digital marketer has to pay lots of attention to it,

If you are trying to acquire some knowledge on improving the CTR here are some suggestions from your Kandra,

• Maintain good average position of the keywords
  • Make sure that your keywords are on the 1^st fold of Google search results (SERP) so that it will have higher chances of people visiting it. CTR and SERP are interchangeable with better CTR keywords are going to take make improvement in average position, the CTR plays a crucial role in improving the Avg position.

Ready to find out more?

Read more about the relationship between CTR and Average Position.

• Write catchy titles & meta descriptions
  • Start the title with the relevant & highest volume keyword
  • Have some call to action in the description
  • Good grammar
  • Use Call out terms in the meta tags
  • Include offers/discounts

• Brand mention if your brand is well known already
  • You can take the advantage of your brand if there are lots of offline campaigns such as TV ads, Radio ads, newspaper ads, hoarding, billboard and more are happening regularly. When the same people see your brand on the Google search results there are high chances of they visiting your webpage since they have heard of your brand a lot already.

• Focus on low competitive keywords
  • This doesn’t mean you are going to optimize for the low volume keywords, you are just picking up the keywords which are not been used by your internet competitors so that you can take advantage over it.

• Implement rich snippets
  • Rich snippets are the brief/gist of your complete webpage and if the interesting content (What use is looking for), such as price, availability, author, duration schedules/dates and more is visible at the first instance itself user is going to give lots of importance to it and hence the CTR will be high with the rich snippets implementation.

Note: There is an equal disadvantage with the rich snippets when the information is not as per audiences expectation for eg: If the product description is shown along with the product availability information as “out of stock”, in this case, the audience would not prefer visiting that webpage.

• Make sure the URL is pretty and in case if users are paying attention to it they should be able to understand it so that they prefer visiting your website.

Improving CTR of search ads- Google AdWords:

• When you are doing paid marketing you will have more options to customize your search ad appearance and you can always try with many types of ads and all the features that AdWords tool allows you.
• AdWords allows you to customize the ad copies the way you want to
• You can have the dynamic keyword insertion ad copies which show users a title starting with the keyword they have used in finding the results
• Google AdWords allows to add attractive site links and you can add as many you can and it picks the best one on a rotation basis.
• Google AdWords allows you to update call-out statement, which basically leaves a information about the USP’s of the product/service and this plays a crucial role in improving the CTR
• One can also update the varieties of snippets, reviews and more, which all lead to high CTR’s

Here are some facts about CTR(Click through rate)

• CTR also depends on industry competition and hence the standard CTR’s vary from industry to industry E.G an education industry
• A better CTR implies you are a dominant player on the SERP

Simple hacks in improving the CTR

• Understanding what is really useful is interested in
  • g: User is price concerned and pays a lot of attention to the price and in this case, you can mention the price info in the Title and meta description
• If the user is offers/discounts focused or something else makes sure you are incorporating it in your meta tags
• If they are more attracted to the mention of the author for an article content using author name in the title adds a lot of value.
• Have a controversial pitch in your titles and description
• Brand mention in the title
• Increase the CPC’s on a paid ad’s so that they would improve your keyword rankings and which might contribute a lot to improving the CTR.

Avoid these silly mistakes:

• Special characters in your Title
  • Special characters sometimes would make the title look ugly or take up more pixels (space) and eliminate the brand name or any other important keyword
• Proper delimiters in the meta tags
  • Not using right delimiters or inappropriate usage of delimiters would lead to an unpleasant view of title in search results.
• Empty variables/Not reviewing it properly during bulk uploads
  • g: Best [-] to buy in this monsoon season.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.