AdWords Optimization - Optimize CTR
We'll see together how to optimise for a goal of CTR.
When I talk about a goal of CTR, this also contains a few other goals as well:
- Increasing ad rank without wanting to increase the max CPCs
- Paying less per click but maintaining current position
- Getting more clicks for the same amount of money (especially when the daily budget is reached
This strategy generally applies to AdWords campaigns with:
- low CTR
- many general keywords
- no or limited negative keywords
- poor account structure
- non-descriptive ad text
If an AdWords account has a poor structure, you can improve it by re-organising general ad groups into more specific ones. Specific and general keywords should be broken out – so if an ad group contains general and specific television keywords, like ‘tv, television, sony television, panasonic tv, etc’ then the ad text would have to be very general in order to be relevant to all of those keywords. It would probably read something like ‘New TVs for Sale’ or ‘Name Brand Televisions’. However, if someone searched on ‘sony television’ and saw your general ad text and saw another ad text that read ‘Sony Televisions for Sale’, that user would find the specific Sony ad text more relevant and it would have a higher CTR. So you can leave the general keywords with the general ad text, and move the more specific keywords into their own ad groups – a Sony AG, a Panasonic AG, etc.
Re-organisation will not always be as simple as you can have 10 different products or brands in an ad group that you break into 10 different ad groups. Moreover, it can occur you don't have a strong website structure to base an organisation on, and you don't necessarily sell a bunch of specific products. In these cases, you often need to find themes in your keyword list to determine organisation. Remember that when the user looks at your ad text, it should match the keyword they are searching on as closely as possible. So even if you are running on two keywords that are synonyms of each other, that doesn’t mean they can go in the same ad group. If you're running on keywords like ‘new car’ ‘new automobile’ ‘new vehicle’, if a user searches on ‘new automobile’ and sees two ads, one that read ‘new car’ and one that reads ‘new automobile’ – their eyes will naturally go to the one that matched exactly what they searched. So, by breaking up the keyword list into themes of the synonyms, you then end up with all ‘new car’ keywords together, all ‘new automobile’ keywords together, etc.
In the end, your ad text should be relevant to every keyword in the ad group. The best way to check this is just to scan all of your ad titles and then scan all of your keywords. If a user were to search on any keyword in your list, would every single ad text for that ad group make sense? If not, perhaps you should break those keywords into a new ad group with new ad text. The best practice is that specific keywords, like ‘victoria beckham jeans’ will have very specific ad text, and that general keywords, like ‘designer jeans’, or leftover specific keywords that don’t get enough traffic to "earn" their own ad group will have general ad text that will be relevant to everything.
- Re-organise general Ad Groups
- Specific and general keywords should not be together
- Look for themes in keyword lists
- Ad text should be relevant to EVERY keyword
- Specific keywords = specific ad text
- General keywords = general ad text
To sum up:
Most determining factor of a good CTR is keywords matching the ad text – therefore a strong structure is imperative
When you are looking at the keywords in a CTR optimisation, you want to find keywords that have been performing very well and expand on them – finding new variations and synonyms. You also want to add a lot of negative keywords. Negative keywords are one of the fastest ways to affect CTR as it ensures people who would not find your ad relevant will never see it on the page. For example, if I am selling a specific product, like an iPod, and see that a lot of people are looking for ipod accessories and I only offer the iPod, I would add negatives like –accessory –accessories –cover –covers. Doing this, you can make general terms more specific. However, if even negatives do not make a general keyword specific enough, then you can determine whether you should change it to an exact match – to make it as specific as possible. The last resort would be to remove keywords that were still too general even after adding negatives or changing the match type. In that case, you would remove the general keyword and add more relevant keywords in its place. If you are removing a lot of impressions with negatives or changing match types or deleting keywords, you want to try and replace some of that lost traffic with new, more relevant keywords that they are not already showing on.
The biggest technique to improve CTR in ad text is to make sure your keywords are in the ad title. The is what will make the user see the relevant of the ad. Once again, the more targeting your structure, the easier it is to have a targeted ad text. Special offers and promotions are sure to draw a user’s eye and increase CTR. You also always want to test multiple creatives – ideally 3 if you are working with higher traffic keywords. Really get creative in your testing to try and find what works the best. You need to stand out from your competitors. Make sure you are always intercapitalising your display URLs and adding the www. if there is room in the front of your URL. Both of these have been found to increase CTR. Make the ad seem larger on the page by treating the capitalisation of the ad text like one long book title and using as much of the character space as you can. In the end, if you are in a very competitive market place and do not have offers or a brand name that makes you stand out from your competition – get creative, be gimmicky. Make your ads rhyme or use really cheesy lines – anything to make your ad stand out. Because you are always testing multiple ads, you can have 2 standard creatives and one that pushes the limits – often you may find that the 3rd text is what catches the eye.