What is a Good Click-Through Rate for AdWords & Display Ads?

If you have done any digital marketing, whether that be DIY or through an agency, you will have come across the metric click-through rate (CTR). CTR refers to how many times people click on your piece of advertising content compared to the amount of times it is shown to people i.e. if your ad was shown 100 times and had 5 clicks then your avg. CTR is 5%. Offered as a percentage, the CTR gives you a good insight into how effective your Ad is – but what is a good CTR?

Data collected by Wordstream found that the average CTR for Google AdWords is 3.17% and 0.46% for Google Display Ads. However, depending on what industry you are in, this average varies wildly.

Average CTR by Industry

These metrics (updated July 2018) offer a good indication of the minimum CTR you should be aiming for within your industry. It’s not unusual to see even higher CTR in certain industries i.e. some of the campaigns we manage at Pixi have 15-25% avg. CTR. If you are not hitting these numbers, most people have a tendency to blame the ads themselves, however before you blame and act to change the creative, consider some of the other factors at play.

How Seasonal is Your Product/Services?

If you are examining your CTR over a short period (week or months), then it may appear over or under inflated by seasonal variance. Similarly, if your campaign ran during a month with a lot of long weekends or public holidays you may see greater or fewer number of clicks depending whether your business is B2B or B2C.

A starting point for identifying seasonal fluctuations is Google Trends. For a more in-depth analysis of your own website’s seasonal traffic you can use Google Analytics and Search Console data (provided your website has been around for a sufficient period of time).

How Can You Improve Your CTR?

This is a common question that we get from business owners running their own campaigns. A good place to start is to make sure that your AdWords account is structured properly and you only target relevant keywords. Adding negative keywords, tweaking your ad creative and running split tests is also highly beneficial.

For the DIYer, this will take an investment of time. For the business owner who may already be wearing a few too many hats, working with an agency that specialises in pay-per-click advertising will vastly improve your ads effectiveness.

Professionally written ad creative, well-designed display ad and in-house knowledge of the best time to run specific ads go a long way in pushing up that CTR and stretching ad budget further. If you would like to chat to a local Google AdWords and Google Display expert, get in touch with the team at Pixi.