Your Click-Through Rate, or CTR for any type of online sales is important, but it’s critical for Pay Per Click where it can determine how much you pay. It’s important, however, that what you do to improve your click through rate doesn’t result in lower conversions.
For instance, adding the word “free” to my headline is a sure fire way to put my click through rate through the roof. But the quality of the clicks will be significantly diluted.
Fortunately for us many of the best ways to boost our CTR also boost the quality of those clicks, which in turn raises our conversion rates.
Display URL
You may consider your display URL something you have very little control over. This is not the case. First and most important: if the domain name in your actual display URL isn’t suggestive, I strongly consider purchasing a domain name, even if you just have to set up a redirect on that domain. You can get.info domain names as low as two dollars.
(You should know that your domain name also plays a significant part in the Quality Score calculation that determines your cost per click).
Once you have a good display URL, you want to make it stand out. Easy ways to do this include capitalizing the first letter, including discreet words that may be in the URL. Sometimes leaving off the “www” also helps to create a stronger visual impact:
BestDietPrograms.com
will give you a higher CTR than
www.bestdietprograms.com
Symbols
Using symbols can create visual impact and add credibility. Copyright, registered name, and trademark symbols, all confer credibility, help your headline and body text standout, and because they are actually considered text can be used within AdWords, which doesn’t allow graphics.
Copyright ©, Registered Name ® , Trademark ™
Whitespace
Sometimes less is more in pay per click. Conventional wisdom has been to use all available space is in writing your copy, because you have so little space to get your message across. But when your ad shows up on a search results page, crowded with seven or 10 other ads, whitespace. Can help your eggs stand out and improve your click through rate.
On a crowded search page, this ad may stand out better…
Fast Weight Loss
Slim Down Now-
Best Diet
BestDietProgram.com
than this ad:
Want to Lose Weight Fast
You Can Lose Weight Very Fast
With the Internet’s Best Diet Program
BestDietProgram.com
These few suggestions can help you boost your click through rate, while also improving the quality of clicks that you get.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Patricia Skinner // Feb 14, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Very interesting points. I’ve just proved your point about adding the word ‘free’ to a post title. I had way more traffic, but most of it was only of a few seconds duration as opposed to several minutes that my usual crowd take browsing my pages.
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