A Good Click-Through Rate!

At the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog, Noah Belson of the Yahoo! Content Quality Analysis team has posted what is to be described as a detailed definition of a good click-through rate.

It is a well known fact that, the click-through rates are campaign dependent and the results vary from campaign to campaign. The CTR is also keyword dependent, meaning that every campaign's CTR would differ and would be entirely dependent on the keywords used. The placing and the rating of your advertisement also directly affect your click through rate.

However, click through rates are just one indicator of your advertisement's success or failure. One other factor that establishes the success of your campaign, is conversions. A CTR is as good as the conversions it leads to. Without sufficient conversions, CTR is just another statistic amongst a crowd of data and indicators.

According to Noah, “This being the case, your click-through rate should really be viewed as only one indicator of your ad’s performance. It’s best to try and balance your evaluation of those rates with a just-as-critical look at your conversion rates (number of clicks converting into sales or other actions you want people to take). While it might be easy to generate a bump in your clicks, you also want those extra clicks convert into sales.”

To turn your CTR into satisfactory conversions, you need to keep the following factors in mind:

1. Competition:

Using generic keywords leads to immense competition and also diminishes the scope of attaining clicks, thereby reducing the conversion rate considerably. Hence you should make use of topic specific keywords that would increase the chances of more clicks and reduces the competition as well.

2. Placement:

It is always advisable to maintain your advertisement quality as high as possible. This will ensure that your advertisements rank higher, thus placing them in the top search results. This will lead to increased traffic to your web site. Also, you should keep your bid on keywords as competitive as possible.

3. Quality of the Advertisement:

Keep in mind that, quality always surpasses quantity. Hence, you should make every effort to create highly relevant advertisements, comprised of essential keywords. A relevant and quality advertisement, appeals to users on a broader spectrum.

4. Testing Your Advertisement:

You should always check the quality of your advertisement as throughly as possible, thus leaving no room for error. Create multiple versions of the same advertisement and then go through all of them. This will help you establish the weak points of your ad and you would also get to know, if you've missed something.

Implementing the above suggestions would be the smartest thing to do, as your advertisement would be more user oriented and would also increase the possibility of higher click through rates and conversions.

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