William Charlwood

If you are running Google AdWords campaigns you may want to know what a good CTR  or Click Through Rate is for your ads.

The answer will depend on a number of factors. First if there is little competition in your niche so that few other advertisers are showing ads then your click through rate is obviously going to be higher than in an area where there are loads of ads showing.

Second, it will depend on where you ad is ranking. An AdWords ad in the first position is almost bound to attract a higher CTR than an ad that ranks in 7th position.

As a guideline I like my ads to get at least a 2% CTR (meaning that for every hundred impressions it gets 2 clicks) but of course the critical thing is the profitability of the clicks. I’d rather have a 1% CTR and be profitable than a 5% CTR and be losing money.

As with many aspects of AdWords, whenever you change one aspect of your Campaign there will be side effects. Increasing the bid price is highly likely to increase you ranking and thus increase your CTR. And the converse applies too.

One thing to bear in mind with CTRs though is that by using strong copywriting skills to write AdWords ads that get the clicks, you can afford to let you ranking drop by reducing your bid price because a well-written ad will naturally attract more attention than a poorly written one.