Google Ads is the most powerful advertising platform in the world. In 2023, Google Ads generated 39% of worldwide digital advertising revenue, more than Facebook, Amazon Ads, and TikTok combined. And it’s no surprise – Google Ads enables digital marketers to run highly-targeted ad campaigns across a variety of channels including search, display, and video.
With Google Ads prices increasing as much as 5-10% in recent years, however, many marketers are looking to optimize their Google Ads programs and maximize return on investment.
Although there are numerous metrics to manage across a Google Ads program, one of the most important is Click Through Rate (CTR). There are two benefits to increasing Google Ads CTR:
This article will explain why optimizing Click Through Rate (CTR) is critical for Google Ads success, and share 4 tactics for improving your Google Ads CTR.
Click Through Rate is a common marketing metric that is used to track the ratio of impressions to clicks. In the case of Google Ads, CTR resembles the percentage of users that clicked on your ads out of all the users that saw them on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). To calculate Google Ads for a given ad, ad set, or campaign, simply divide impressions by clicks.
Clicks
___________ = Click Through Rate
Impressions
When calculating CTR you can use unique clicks and unique impressions to determine the percentage of unique individuals that clicked on your ads after seeing them, and total clicks and total impressions to determine the percentage of sessions that led to an ad click.
As with many marketing metrics, CTR can vary significantly across industries. Particularly on Google Ads, where certain industries are able to achieve a higher average CTR than others.
Google Ads Search Ad CTR can range from 2% to 6% depending on industry, with Dating services achieving the highest CTR of 6.05%, and technology companies achieving the lowest CTR of 2.09%.
Google Ads Google Display Network (GDN) CTR, however, is more consistent across industries, falling in the range of 0.5% to 0.7%, with the exception of Real Estate, which achieved an average GDN CTR of 1.08%.
See 2024 Google Ads CTR benchmarks for your industry here.
Improving Google Ads CTR is a great way to generate more engagement for your ads and increase your Quality Score. Here are 5 tactics you can use to begin improving your Google Ads CTR today.
Google Ads PPC targeting is based on search keywords. To capture users’ interest and improve CTR, it’s important to target the keywords that are a good fit for your products and services, and ensure your ads are optimized for the keywords you’ve chosen.
Google currently allows up to 20,000 keywords per Ad Group, however most experts advise selecting 5-20. As you’re thinking about which keywords to choose for each ad group, it’s important to keep two things in mind:
If you’re just getting started with keyword selection, you might consider leveraging Google Ads Keyword Planner, which offers a list of suggested keywords for each of your campaigns. Keyword Planner also provides information on how much you’ll likely need to bid to win a placement for a given keyword, which helps you determine whether suggested keywords are in your budget.
Google Ads also displays an Expected Click Through Rate for each keyword, which predicts how likely it is that your ads will get clicked when shown for that keyword, based on past performance and your ad's position. Review Expected CTR as you choose your keywords to make sure you’re not bidding on keywords with a low chance of success.
Once you’ve selected your target keywords, there are several steps you can take to further hone your ad targeting. Optimizing ad targeting is important because it reduces chances of your ads being shown to users that aren’t interested. It will also reduce the number of clicks generated by users that aren’t a good fit to buy, saving campaign budget.
Negative keywords allow you to define specific keywords for which you don’t want ads within a campaign or ad group to be served on. For example, businesses promoting reading glasses may want to define negative keywords such as “wine glasses” and “drinking glasses” to prevent their ads being served to users on the hunt for drinkware.
Location and demographics exclusions prevent your ads from being served to users based on individual characteristics such as location, age, and income. For example, if you currently sell your products in the United States of America but aren’t currently able to ship to Canada, you can exclude advertisements from being shown to users in Canada.
In addition to leveraging Google audience exclusion capabilities, you can also leverage external solutions alongside Google to sharpen the targeting of your Google Ads campaigns. When a campaign audience is defined using keyword and demographic data, it may end up including active or recent customers that are not interested in your offer. Serving advertisements to active customers can result in not only wasted ad spend, but also a poor customer experience.
Sharpen your campaign targeting by creating customer segments in a first-party data platform and syncing them to Google Marketing Platform, where they can be leveraged as suppression lists on your campaigns. By importing suppression lists to Google Marketing Platform, preventing your budget from being invested in the active customers and ensuring more budget is allocated to target future customers. For example, you may upload an audience of customers that have made a purchase in the last 7 days, and exclude them from being shown ads promoting a new product offer.
When syncing audiences to Google from any external or internal system, it’s important to ensure that you have the necessary privacy controls in place to support user consent management and data privacy. For more information on how Google Marketing Platform processes and handles first-party data uploaded to their platform, you can learn more about Customer Match here.
Research has shown that mirroring, the act of repeating the word or phrase that some has just said, helps build a feeling of connection and trust. One of the benefits of Google Ads is that when users enter a search query, they are beginning a conversation, sharing signals about what they’re looking for and how ready they are to make a purchase. Align your ad copy to your target keywords in order to “mirror” the user’s search back to them. This will increase your chances of capturing their attention and building trust.
Google Ads makes it possible to mirror search language at scale with dynamic keyword insertion. Dynamic keyword insertion lets you automatically update your ads with the keywords in your ad group that caused your ads to show. While this does make it easier to align your ad copy to users’ search queries, it can result in grammatical errors (at best) and copyright infringement (at worst) if you’re not careful. For more information we’d recommend this article from Wordstream on when and when not to use dynamic keyword insertion.
In addition to the standard headline and description, you can also expand your ad with assets (formerly known as ad extensions), which allow you to present information such as product prices and contact information in your ad. Assets make it easier for the user to evaluate your ad and build trust.
Ultimately, writing great Google Ad copy is not a one-time effort. Rather, the best paid marketers test and learn to optimize their ad copy over time. Once your ads are launched, we’d recommend leveraging Google’s A/B testing capabilities to understand how copy variations perform. Luckily for marketers, Google offers pre-built custom experiments capabilities which make it easy to get started.
Custom experiments allow you to create an alternate version of an existing campaign and compare how the alternate performs against the original campaign over time. The alternate version will share the original campaign’s traffic and budget, reducing the number of variables that can impact your test results. As your experiment is running, you can visit the Experiment summary table in your Ads Manager and review performance data for each campaign version. You can also choose to end your test at any time and if your alternate version is a winner, replace the original campaign with the alternate.
By developing a culture of testing and learning, you can stay aligned to user preferences as they evolve and continually optimize your Google Ads CTR.
John Joe Smith, founder and CEO of WasteNot, is hosted by Tom Triscari, founder of Quo Vadis, for a Q&A conversation on the future of audience suppression.
Many advertisers waste up to 40% of their ad budgets due to inefficient targeting, and they aren't even aware of it. In this article, we'll walk through how brands can use modern audience suppression strategies to improve advertising efficiency and performance.
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WasteNot is the only platform focused on allowing marketers to activate and optimize real time ad exclusions across all biddable media.