Today we have a guest post from one of our PPC Hero allies! Dan Roche is a PPC Specialist for PushOn Ltd, a digital marketing agency based in Manchester, UK.
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Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is an extremely important factor when managing your Pay Per Click accounts. The main focus of the advertiser is to gain a high number of qualified, targeted clicks to their site therefore having a relevant and appealing advert is a must. Ever since the introduction of Quality Score, companies and agencies around the globe have turned a lot of their focus to improving CTR. Below are 4 main tips to increase CTR which I frequently use while optimizing my client’s adverts.
How To Increase PPC CTR
1. Trademark or Registered Symbol
By using the Trademark Symbol ™ or the Registered Symbol ® it makes your advert look official and gives the impression that you can trust this brand. To insert the Trademark ™ symbol hold down the Alt button and type 0153 and to insert the Registered ®symbol simply hold Alt and type 0174. These symbols are a must if you are in competition with other companies bidding on your brand. We have seen excellent results from putting this method into action:
2. Call To Actions and Incentive Based Words
The key to creating a great text advert is to have a strong Call to Action and an incentive based word. Incentive based words include Guaranteed, Save, Free and by using these words with Call to Actions such as Buy Now, Book Now, Order Today we have seen CTR’s as much as double for our client’s.
3. Sitelinks
Sitelinks appear just below your advert in the paid search results. They are a collection of links that are interactive and take the visitor to a specific landing page. Sitelinks can be very influential when it comes to increasing CTR. The method that I suggest using when creating Sitelinks is to tie them in with your Goals and Objectives set up in Google Analytics or whatever tracking software you use. For example if you have several goals set up such as ticket purchases, complimentary tickets, newsletter signups and contact us I would use the following headings as sitelinks
Buy Tickets – Complimentary Tickets – Sign Up To Newsletter – Contact Us
4. Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Dynamic Keyword Insertion or DKI is an easy way to make your advert more relevant to the searched query. DKI can be included in the headline, body of the text and the display URL therefore you can make the advert extremely relevant. The premise of DKI is that whatever query is searched it is placed in the text advert, but there are many formats that you can use this:
- {keyword:your text here} if you want your keyword(s) in lower case. E.g. fried chicken
- {Keyword:your text here} if you want the first letter of your first keyword capitalised. E.g. Fried chicken
- {KeyWord:your text here} if you want the first letter of all your keywords capitalised. E.g. Fried Chicken
When creating text adverts it is best practice to use DKI where possible but be careful and make sure that all keywords in the Ad Group would fit into your text advert and make sense. There may be several instances where you use DKI and the advert doesn’t make sense.
There are an unlimited amount of methods that you can use to improve your accounts CTR and these are just a tip of the iceberg. Just one final tip; test, test, test and always remember your CTR can be improved regardless of its present performance.
