Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The CTR indicates how many people that saw an ad finally also clicked on it. 

With this value, you can measure how successful a particular ad is towards your users and whether they interact with it. Furthermore, you can check whether the placement is ideal and its design is right.

On the other hand, you can also quickly see from a low CTR the ad is performing poorly and that your users don’t feel addressed by it.

That’s why the CTR is one of the essential bases for optimizing your ad setup with A/B testing to achieve higher revenues. 

The CTR is usually expressed as a percentage and calculated as follows:

CTR = Number of clicks/Number of impressions *100%
CTR = 200 (clicks) / 10.000 (impressions) *100% = 2,0%

Calculating the click-though rate with Google Analytics data

You will find the ad impressions and ad clicks tracked by Advanced Ads as individual events in your Google Analytics reports.

We’ll take a slight detour and export it to a Google Spreadsheet. In this way, we can automatically calculate the click-though-rate from this data in Google Analytics.

This workaround to automatically calculate the click-through rates of ads tracked with Google Analytics only supports properties that use the Universal Analytics tag.

If your property uses “Google Analytics 4”, you cannot export the event data to Google Sheets.

How to increase CTR?

There are several basic recommendations on how to increase click-through rate:

Choose relevant queries and be sure to use occurrences in the title and in the ad text. Experienced marketers advise using 2-3 complex phrases in order to accurately adjust to the target audience and exclude non-targeted clicks.

Use a call to action. It should be at the end of every ad to encourage the user to click through to the page. Call to action (CTA) increases the CTR of ads by 10-30%.

Separate advertising in YAN and on search.

Use negative keywords and the “prohibited sites” feature to narrow your audience as much as possible and work only with targeted traffic.

Specify sitelinks – this will provide more information and visually expand the ad in the search results.

Set the display time, add thematic pictures to banners on YAN.

Conduct experiments, spy on competitors, but do not copy. Test different ideas. The CTR indicator will tell you whether the changes are correct or not.

Use keyword matching options to help remove irrelevant searches.