Click Through Rate, CTR, is one of the most important metrics for the effectiveness of organic or sponsored search engine optimization, in this article we will try to explain why.
A well-known and familiar phrase from ancestral chapters at the bible asks us, the people, not to look at the pitcher but at what is in it. When analyzing this statement in depth, in the spirit of the period in which it was said, there is no room for doubt: The trial thinker could have been an excellent director of any digital marketing campaign.
What is a CTR and how is it related to a pitcher?
Click Through Rate, CTR, is the ratio between the number of clicks on a page title or ad, and the number of times that title was presented to the user. The higher the CTR for a particular title, it is considered more effective, convertible and successful.
Allegedly, and unlike other metrics in the digital marketing world, the CTR does not depend on the quality of the internal content, which should lead to the click on the page title or ad. When an ad is shown to a client – he doesn’t know what’s behind it. The client does not understand from the ad whether he will come to a secure site, whether the site is optimized for mobile, whether the content is high quality and original, whether it is missing spelling and syntax errors, etc.
Therefore, one might mistakenly think that the process of optimizing the ad title or article, and improving the ad or article description field, is enough to increase the CTR.
The truth, of course, is completely different.
Quality and diverse content, on various digital platforms, may not directly affect the CTR of an ad, but can certainly affect the way an ad is displayed, and indirectly, on the chance of the user clicking on it.
Later, we will present a number of ways that we, the campaign managers, can improve our CTR. Some will require us to improve and optimize content on the site itself.
This is what the CTR in search console looks like:
The egg and chicken effect of CTR
One of the important elements to understand about CTR and organic or sponsored search engine optimization is the duality of this metric. what does it mean? It’s clear to everyone that as a given web page rises in the rankings on the search results page, its CTR rate is likely to increase (except for special cases – we’ll get to them later).
However, some believe that the CTR itself is a metric that influences the position of a particular page in the search results. When you think about it, it can make sense: After all, in a sponsored campaign, the search engine’s primary interest is to increase the CTR for the ads shown. Clicking is worth money. Therefore, in cases where an ad “suffers” from a low CTR, it will be priced at a higher price.
The egg and chicken effect is, in fact, the most important reason why CTR should be improved: CTR improvement can encourage progress in locations that will encourage further CTR improvement, which will bring more traffic to the site.
7 tips for improving your CTR
There are quite a few ways to consistently improve your CTR and thus set up traffic to your site. Here are some of them:
1. Improving the Meta Title
Create a title that is intriguing and encourages the user to click on it. Include in it the keywords searched by the user. Make sure the title is missing spelling and syntax errors. Include the brand name in the title. Be creative and witty. Don’t be afraid to get out of the box in this case. Learn how your competitors are displaying their ads or pages on search engines, and strive to produce better and more eye-catching titles.
2 . Improving the Meta Description
Create a focused description that appeals to the user and drives him to action. In many cases, Google chooses not to display this field to the user, if it believes it is not of sufficient quality. Invest time and thought into creating a description that will include the keywords you want to promote. In some of the searches, the keywords you have entered in this field will be highlighted, which will highlight the relevance of this search result for the phrase typed by the user.
3. Add Site Links
These are additional links to internal pages, which are displayed together with the main search engine result. Site Links greatly improves not only the CTR, but also, and especially the user satisfaction, which succeed through these links to get directly to the target page, without having to navigate within the site to the relevant page. The sitelinks cannot be proactively set, which is something that Google adds to sites that are authoritative enough and arranged in a proper hierarchy.
Here is an example from my site that is currently used as a yielding digital asset:
What you can do is add a table of contents to the page as it exists on this page and then in many cases, Google draws the titles into the search results, here’s an example:
4. Promote images from the site to Google’s image index
When it comes to performing a search using a search engine, our natural tendency is to think about text search. However, quite a few searches are actually done for pictures. Furthermore, sometimes searches for a site via text lead us to results that include images. In many cases, this is a very successful method. Think about the end result: If you are promoting, for that matter, a website that is about designing office furniture, then a single desk image can reach the customer much more easily, even more than a thousand words of the desk description. ?
Here is an example from my site that is currently used as a yielding digital asset:
5. Linking a video to the Google search result
One of the ways to increase the CTR on search engine result is to create a quality video that will be displayed to the user as one of the click options for a particular phrase search. This addition, of another link shown to the user, increases the chance that the user will choose to click on the result that interests us.
There are, of course, other ways to improve CTR, but the message is clear: Today’s search engines are becoming more sophisticated, offering information to the user in a wide variety of visual displays. If in the past a successful title and a average description would be enough to achieve the best CTR, today, rather than investing in the quality of internal content on the site, along with proper work on titles and descriptions, they allow a significant increase in the amount of potential customer clicks.
Here is another example from my site that is currently used as a yielding digital asset:
6. Using Schemes
Another way to emphasize our Google result is to embed schemes. A rating scheme will appear in star form and give our result a lot of volume and presence,
For example:
I created this Scheme with the wp-review-pro extension.
7. Using emojis
Adding emoji to the title can do wonders for the CTR percentage, it is strongly recommended to document the CTR percentage before adding the emoji and two months afterwards and to draw conclusions.
To go to the full tutorial of inserting emojis to the title click here
This is how it looks:
When CTR cannot be improved?
It is important to understand that we will not always be able to improve the CTR of a particular search result. As a result, in many cases, search results are ranked high on the search results page, and their CTR is low.
when is it happening?
Especially when the user’s intention is very specific.
Here is an example:
A household that employs a cleaning worker is required to pay for Social Security once a quarter. To do this, the employer can log on to the Social Security Payment Website and begin the reporting and payment process for the work hours of the household worker.
Now, the likelihood that searches like “the Social Security Payments Website” will also click on the second and third results, certainly in relation to their high ranking, is very low. why? Because the user has a clear intention here: he does not want to read long articles about household payments to employees, but rather to go to the payment site, perform the procedure in the shortest time, and go back to lounging on the sofa in the living room.
This is why smart campaign management, whether sponsored or organic promoted, we should be guided first by the user’s intent. The better we understand it, the better the search results that shown to the user and lead to our site.
Why prioritize CTR improvement over other site marketing tasks?
Every business owner knows that the amount of tasks he is required to do to promote the business is endless. And in this sea of tasks, and in the face of his spare time, he is asked to prioritize the marketing tasks of the business in the smartest possible way.
Well, there are quite a few cases where a significant improvement in the CTR is a real quick win. why? Let’s take an example.
Suppose you own a print business on various shirts and clothing items. You’ve found that most of your customers come from sponsored campaigns you run on Google’s search engine.
When you sat down to analyze the data, you found that one in every 100 users who land on the landing page you created contacts you and orders a set of printed shirts.
How can you, in such a case, increase site sales by two times? Well, one way is to get the site through the sponsored campaign more interested. In fact, it’s about doubling the marketing budget for this channel.
A second, smarter way would be to increase the CTR from one percent to two. It is likely that the improvements you make to increase the percentage of clicks will be significantly cheaper than doubling your campaign budget. Also, and this is perhaps the most important reason for doing so, the improvements you make to doubling the CTR will surely accompany you in the following campaigns as well.
In conclusion
CTR is an important metric that drastically affects the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. If you, as the campaign managers, can significantly improve it, it is very likely that, from a cost-benefit perspective, you should do the task.
Good luck!
