How To Increase Click Through Rate For Google Display Advertising

How to make the most out of your campaigns

Google Display Ads are a fantastic advertising feature from Google, allowing businesses to capture their audience’s attention with visually appealing ads. This is especially the case for ecommerce businesses who sell items such as clothing, home interior and makeup, as their products can be a great choice for this advertising format due to their aesthetic nature.

However, no matter how stunning your products are or how well you’ve put your Display Ad together, it all comes down to whether these ads can get you the Click Through Rate (CTR) you need to thrive as a business.

If you’ve just launched a Display Ad campaign and you want to increase its chances of success, or if you’re looking into utilising this feature in your future campaigns, we’re here to help.

We can provide businesses with an insight into the world of Google Advertising to help them make the most out of their campaigns. Keep on reading to find out how you can increase your CTR for Google Display Ads.

What is the Click Through Rate?

Before you can learn how to increase your CTR’s, it’s important to understand exactly what it is. When it comes to online advertising, the Click Through Rate is a term that refers to the number of people who click on an ad. CTR highlights exactly how many people who see an ad actually end up clicking on it.

According to Google, “CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown”.

How is the CTR calculated?

CTRs are calculated using a formula:

Clicks
______ = CTR
Impressions

For example, imagine you had 7 clicks and 100 impressions. This would mean that your CTR would be 7%.

What is a good CTR for Display Ads?

The average Google Display ads CTR is 0.47%. Therefore, a good CTR for these ads would be anywhere between 0.5% and 1%.

However, these numbers can change based on a variety of factors. For example, if you’re running Display Ads in multiple countries, you’ll see a wider variety of CTRs. This is because people in different countries will resonate with your ads and your brand in unique ways.

It’s incredibly important to keep a close eye on your analytics reports and use this data to come up with new strategies to increase your CTR. Below are some more helpful tips to help you increase your CTR.

How to Increase the average CTR for Display Ads

There are several best practices you can adopt to ensure your Display Ads are providing you with an optimal CTR. We’ve listed some of these tactics below for you to consider:

Reconsider your sales strategy – a lot of the time, CTRs don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ad design itself, but rather with the promotional sales strategy you’ve used. This means that if you aren’t seeing the CTRs you expected, you’ll need to rethink your campaign, starting with its backbone.
Audience setting (remarketing) – Google Display Ads provide you with the option to remarket to a select audience. This is an incredibly useful feature that, if used properly, can dramatically increase your CTR. Considering that the Google Display Network reaches 92% of all internet users, it’s important to understand remarketing.

Essentially, remarketing relies on complex machine learning technology to allow companies to retarget users who have visited their website, app, or YouTube channel as part of a customer list.

Another way you can target audiences is to customise your settings to reach either people who have visited specific sites, such as your competitors’, or people who are actively searching for specific keywords in Google.

Geotargeting (target specific locations) – a basic rule of online advertising is to set the location for your ads. For example, if you’re a local business looking to attract people who live nearby, there’s no point wasting budget trying to reach people from outside of your town or city. Instead, select the precise area you wish to advertise to and add a 10-30 mile radius.

It’s important to be precise with this. Make sure you select the option “People in your targeted locations” option, otherwise if you go with Google’s pre-set option, you’ll be paying for excess clicks on your ads from people who will probably never visit your store.

Topics – make sure that when you’re setting up your Display Ads that you go through the “Topics” section. This section allows you to further refine your audience groups by selecting options from a wide variety of topics. Here, you’ll see two options: Targeting – when you select the “targeting” option, all you have to do is choose your preferred topics from a pre-set list. Your ads will then be shown to people who have performed certain actions related to the topic you have chosen.

Observation – if you’re unsure about the topic you have chosen for your campaign, the “observation” option is ideal for you. This option does not restrict your audience targeting and instead, only collects information about the performance of the topics you choose.

Placements – the websites you choose to place your Display Ads on will determine the CTR of these ads. Make sure to properly assess all your options to choose the best placement. For example, some platforms have deals with certain websites which allows for better targeting.For instance, if you own a pet supplies store, you won’t get many clicks if you run your display ad on an online newspaper’s website.
Optimise your ad – of course, one of the best ways to increase your CTR is to optimise your ad. There are plenty of ways you can optimise your ad, for example:

The design – if your ads haven’t been performing well, try changing up their design. Think about the layout and the colours and test various combinations to see which ones perform best.

The call to action (CTA) – often, the CTA can get overlooked in the ad design process. However, it could determine if you get clicks on your ad or not. Make sure you use action words, ensure your CTA is brief and choose a clickable colour to contrast it against the rest of the ad.

The button – just like your CTA, it’s important that you consider the shape, colour, and location of the CTA button. Find a shape that matches your overall design, choose eye-catching colours, and find the perfect placement. Normally, buttons should follow the headline.

Are you ready to stand out online?

These are just some of the ways in which you can increase your Google Display Ads CTR. If you would like further help and information, please get in touch with our team of experts today.