4 Tips to Improve Your Google Ads CTR

The CTR, or Click Through Rate,  is one of the keymetrics in Google Ads that really make a difference. It indicates what percentage of people continue to click on your ad after they see it. In short: it’s indicator on how attractive your ads and campaigns are. But how can you improve it? In this article I will give you 4 tips on how you can improve your CTR on Google Ads.

Tip 1 – Search Term Report

The Search Term Report is highly valuable and often times overlooked. This report shows you which keywords were triggered by what people actually look for. It gives you a great idea about what is on people’s minds and how they look for specific products or services.

However, this is also the place that gives you an idea on what to include as keywords. It’s a huge source of inspiration. But, it also shows irrelevant search terms that bring your CTR down.

If you see anything irrelevant directly exclude these from your ad group or campaign. Or maybe even your entire account. It helps you filter out unwanted traffic.

For example you run a luxury sunglass brand, but your ads are being shown to people looking for “cheap sunglasses”. Those are not your ideal customers and bring down your metrics. They can even cost you your advertising budget.

So you exclude [cheap sunglasses] in an exact negative match type from your ad group or campaign, but you can also exclude the word cheap in a broad match type on a negative keyword list that covers your entire account. You now exclude a group of people, that are not the type of customers you would like to attract.

Tip 2 – Adjust Your Ads

Your ads is the text that’s shown to your potential customers. So it needs to be relevant and enticing. You show your relevancy by including keywords that are within your ad group. You include these keywords in the headlines and description lines. If you don’t,  your ad will have a poor ad strength. Meaning, it won’t perform well, and Google will penalize you.

With Responsive Search Ads you can see your ad strength. Ranging from Poor to Excellent. So if you see any ads with “poor” or “below average score” it’s time to review those ads and freshen them up.

Make sure you make use of all the headlines you can fill in, and use your keywords. The same counts for your description lines.  Adjust your Responsive Search Ads until they’re at least “above average” or “good”.

You can give your ad strength an extra boost by making use of keyword insertion for example {Keyword: Luxury Sunglasses}. This often times helps me get a better score.

Are your ads still not improving? Make sure you only pin one headline and one description line if necessary. If you pin too many, Google will have issues serving the best possible combination of your head- and description lines.

Tip 3 – Change The Match Type

Changing your Match Type also relates to Tip number 1. Sometimes your keywords are too broad or too narrow for them to perform. If your CTR is too low, and you have a lot of different search terms that are irrelevant: you might want to change your Match Type.

If you’re working with a broad match type, change it to phrase match. If you’re already on phrase match type, change it to exact match.

Tip 4 – Create New Ad Groups

Another thing to look at is your number of keywords. Google recommends to have 5 – 15 keywords per ad group. Of course this can vary per account strategy.

However, if you have more than 15 keywords, they can’t be as tightly related to one another. This also means your ads aren’t as targeted as to what people are searching for either.

Find out which keywords are more related to another than other and split them up in different ad groups.  For example “Turtoise Cat Eye Sunglasses” is more tightly related to “Cat Eye Sunglasses” than to “Red Sunglasses”.

By splitting these keywords up in different ad groups you can now write ads that are more specific to what people are looking for. Making your potential customer more likely to click.

Why You Should Care About CTR

Those were my four tips on how to improve your CTR. But why should you care about your CTR?

As I said before the CTR is one of Google Ads cornerstone metrics. CTR is also one of the parts that goes into your Quality Score. The Quality Score is key in the Ad Auction which determines which ads get shown at the top of the page.

Meaning: if your ad isn’t good enough, you’re probably paying more to even compete against your competitors. Plus, in some cases your ads might not even be shown at all.

But what’s a good CTR? It highly depends on your industry. A general aim should be at least 10% percent. But for B2B accounts this can might be lower depending on the industry.

I hope you got something out of this and now know how you can improve your CTR! Do you need help with your CTR or have some other questions about Google Ads? Then get in touch!