Click through rate is an important metric for measuring how effective your PPC and social media ads are.
Click through rate tells you what percentage of people who saw your ads actually clicked on them. The math for determining your click through rate is pretty simple.
Just divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions. Then multiply the answer by 100.
It looks like this:
This is a good equation to keep in your back pocket when you’re running any sort of PPC campaign.
However, for the purpose of establishing objectives, it’s important to know how high the bar is set when it comes to performance.
Naturally, we want to know whether our numbers look good or bad.
To help you evaluate how well your ads are doing, we’ve collected data to shed some light on where the benchmark is and some tips for reaching that benchmark.
What is a good click through rate?
There are some nuances in unpacking what a good click through rate is.
Your click through rate depends on a few factors:
- Industry.
- Marketing channel.
- Type of ad.
Here’s how the numbers shake out for each of these factors:
- Average click through rate on the Google search network across all industries: 1.91%
- Average click through rate on the Google display network across all industries: .35%
There’s some variance here, but if you’re achieving a click through rate of two percent or higher, you’re doing pretty well. However, even if you’re meeting this click through rate benchmark, it’s best to keep testing and improving your ads.
Who knows, you might completely blow away that average click through rate.
Here are some tips and best practices to help you achieve—or maybe even beat—the average click through rate.
How to improve your click through rate
There are a few things you can do that will reliably help you get at least acceptable click through rates.
The good news is that they’re all relatively simple!
1. Use keywords in your ad copy
Obviously, this one starts with keyword research.
But, if it’s possible without being too awkward, using the keywords that people use to search for your product or service in your ads signals that you’ve got what they’re looking for.
As long as the copy sounds natural, you can use the same tactic in your social media ads. You’ll get clicks from the people who’ve looked for what you’ve got but haven’t purchased yet.
2. Focus on ad formats that give the best return
As you saw earlier, Facebook video ads get the best click through rate compared to other ads.
In other advertising mediums, there will be a clear winner when it comes to the best type of ad to use. Sometimes, you won’t be able to use that winning ad type.
But, whenever you can, you should skew your ads toward the most effective formats. If there’s no data to follow here, try your hand at collecting your own!
Run the same number of each ad type for a while. Once you’ve got enough data to identify the best format, stick with that one and focus on refining it to perfection.
3. Use structured data
Have you ever searched Google and found that there’s a specific result that’s displayed before the organic search results?
These pages use structured data to speak directly to Google’s algorithms.
Implementing structured data in your landing pages and websites will improve your Google ad rankings for links to those websites.
This can increase your click through rate by way of increasing your impressions. However, if your ads need work, it could decrease your click through rate.
Either way, structured data will improve your click through rates or give you more data for improving your ads (and therefore, your click through rate).
4. Always include a call to action
For Google ads, email and more traditional ad channels, this usually isn’t a problem.
However, social media ads work best when they’re not pushy.
With this in mind, sometimes people think that maybe leaving the call to action out will make their social media ads less invasive on people’s feeds.
This is a bit too extreme, though.
Keep your call to action.
But make it subtle.
You want to give prospects a way to take the next buying step. Just don’t force it on them.
5. Test your headlines
In any ad, your headline is arguably the most important part. Especially in very short ad formats.
If you only tested one part of your ads, your headline would be the best thing to test and iterate. Fortunately, running A/B tests with headlines is pretty simple.
Run two versions of an ad, each with a different headline.
After you’ve collected some data, just stop running the ad with a lower click through rate.
The cool thing about A/B testing like this is that you can continually improve your ads by writing new ones and testing them against your existing ads.
If you do this, it’s possible that you eventually completely crush the average click through rate.
Achieving really impressive click through rates isn’t something that you can do over night. But if you follow these tips and stick with the process, you’ll soon be getting rock star click through rates and smiling all the way to the bank.
If you’re feeling good about your click through rates after reading this, great!
If you’re ready to start working on them, feel free to bookmark this page and come back whenever you want to compare your click through rates to the benchmark.
