What Is A Click-Through Rate And How It Can Influence Quality Score

Click-through rate or CTR is one of the measurements, which are used to evaluate the efficiency of the online pay-per-click campaign. Internet marketing often involves pay-per-click advertising in complex with other techniques of website promotion, such as copywriting and building backlinks.

 

Click-through rate shows the ratio between the number of a particular ad impressions and the number of clicks on this advertisement. Literally, CTR shows the percentage of clicks on your advertising, which is calculated on the basis of how many times your ad was shown to the visitors. For example, if an ad was shown 100 times and 1 person clicked on it – the CTR will be 1%.

 

The CTR rate is vitally important for advertisers because it reflects how visitors perceive the particular text and format of the advertising. If the CTR is too low – that is the true signal, saying that people are not interested in what is advertised or how it is advertised. High CTR rate, on the contrary, means that an advertiser is on the right way to the internet marketing success.

 

OK, now we know that the higher CTR – the better, but what rate should be considered encouragingly high and what should be treated as desperately low. Basically, there is no a commonly accepted range, since a lot depends on the particular situation. Most of the experts agree that the average click-through rate in PPC advertising today is about 0.2 – 0.3 percents. In other words, a typical ad will receive 2 clicks per every 2 or 3 thousands of impressions.

 

Here it is necessary to note a significant role played by keywords in the internet marketing concept. Usually, more general keywords get much lower CTR than specific keyword phrases. For example, for an advertisement with the keyword “movie” the CTR rate of 0.2% will be a huge success. However, if an advertiser will use more specific keyword, for example “movie store in Dallas”, a significantly higher CTR can be achieved.

 

The higher click-through rate – the higher Quality Score is. It is now known that all the major online advertising platforms, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN, use quality score to rate the submitted ads and define the place of their displaying on a generic search results page, where such ad should be shown. In other words, if there are 7 advertisers bidding for the same keyword, the priority will be given to the one with the highest quality score. Besides, keeping quality score high can help to lower the minimal bid rate. So, it is obvious that online advertisers should do their best to influence quality score.

 

Fortunately, search engines revealed the factors which are considered when calculating the quality score, and now all the web masters and online advertisers can tune their ads to get as high quality score as possible. Below are the primary factors, which influence the quality score:

 

So, it looks like internet marketing is getting more and more sophisticate these days. Thinking of it as of the program, where invested money is enough to generate a huge traffic to your site, seems to be “slightly” misleading. Now, it is a very competitive environment and online advertising requires significant skills and understanding of the PPC strategy as well as its key influential factors, such as CTR and quality score in order to be successful in the internet marketing.