Pay Per Click Advertising

Double Your Click-Through Rate Using AdWords Placement Reports

Here’s a tip that could double your click-through rate when advertising on Google’s content network. Make sure you use the placement reports in AdWords to track the sites showing your ads. Then add exclusions to remove any sites with a bad CTR.

I didn’t start doing this soon enough and wish I had. Here’s an example of how much of a difference it can make. We had a campaign that in January got 94 clicks from 34,011 impressions for a 0.28% click-through rate. Not good but not terrible either. Well, if I had paid more attention to the placement reports, I would have known that MySpace gave us 0 clicks from 19,204 impressions. Just getting rid of MySpace would have bumped the click-through rate of that campaign to 0.63%. Making one simple change can more than double your CTR. Nice!

I’m not picking on MySpace traffic either (it probably works well for some things). The top 10 sites where our ads were shown gave us 0 clicks from over 30,000 impressions. Wipe out those worthless impressions and our click-through rate on the content network jumps up into search network territory.

Now, it’s true CTR doesn’t play as large a role in your Quality Score on the content network. It’s better to be safe than sorry though (just imagine how much Google would love you with a super high CTR). Do whatever you can to keep Google happy.

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