“Why would anyone want to advertise on Google?”
“Nobody ever clicks the ads!”
I hear these comments again and again whenever I tell people that I manage Google Adwords accounts for a living. Whether I’m speaking to small-business owners, application developers, database administrators, doctors, lawyers, (this is beginning to sound like a joke), they all insist -
“I never click the ads!”
So, more often than not, I press them for details. After all, marketing is about connecting to people.
So I say, “really? Do you really never click on the ads? Not at all? Like never, ever? ”
And usually, they respond something like, “Oh, Okay, I guess I once clicked on an ad,” or, “Well, I think I click on an ad maybe once every hundred times I do a search.”
If customers click on an ad once every hundred searches, then this means the ad has a click-through-rate (CTR) of 1%.
And I tell them that that is exactly what we find. Visitors to Google click on an ad about 1% of the time. For all my clients, we aim for a click-through-rate of 1%. Sometimes it’s higher and sometimes it’s lower.
When the CTR is very high, Google rewards you by increasing your ad’s ranking. This usually leads to an even higher CTR. I have seen Adgroups with a CTR as high as 30% for some keywords. Another bonus of having a high-CTR Adgroup is that the CPC is smaller, meaning your click-costs decrease!
On the other hand, when the CTR is too low, Google punishes the ad by reducing its ranking. When the CTR of a certain keyword within an Adgroup is too low, it brings the rest of the adgroup down with it.
Therefore, for our clients, we routinely ‘prune’ the Adgroup for underperforming keywords. We delete these words from the Adgroup, and this in turn increases the Adgroups average CTR, leading to a lower CPC.
After explaining all this to potential customers, they invariably agree that Google Adwords is a great marketing tool, even if the ads are clicked only once every hundred searches.
