Email marketing: what it is and how to implement it

What does CTR mean and how do you calculate it?

 If you're an eCommerce worker, website owner, or interested in Digital Marketing, you've probably heard about click-through rate (CTR), along with other technical terms like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, conversion rate, and others, and you wanted to know the difference between them, and the relationship between them and their exact click-through rate. Given the importance of the CTR impact on ads and other marketing areas, we'll try to simplify the topic in the following lines.

What is CTR?

Click-through Rate means the percentage that results from dividing the number of clicks your ad or web page gets by the number of impressions, and if this percentage is high it indicates that your users are interacting well with the type of ads you place on your site or content, which is also a good indicator of how strong and relevant keywords you use are performing.

Because ads are ubiquitous and people are used to them, the click-through rate has decreased for impressions and often only a few clicks per thousand impressions. Here's an example of how to calculate CTR: You have an ad with 10 clicks out of 1,000 views and you want to calculate your CTR, so it's as simple as this:

CTR = 10 / 100 = 0.1

The importance of CTR

Unless you are an advertiser or publisher, CTR is very important for your business, including the ads you naturally target, and these are the most important benefits of studying CTR:

• CTR directly affects the Quality Score of the ad campaigns you've created, and the ranking of your ads posted later on your site, online store, or YouTube channel on the SERPs search results page.

• If the rate is low, it will make you decide to work on the relevance of your ads and design a more effective ad.

• A higher CTR will tell you that your ad is more user-friendly and vice versa.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

• Improve the user experience as a whole.

What affects CTR?

Of course, it is not up to chance, there are many factors that you have to identify, the most important of which are:

• The quality of the activity and content in which you specialize as a field (e-commerce, news web, visual content, etc.)

• The size of the dependence on pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

• The quality of the keywords used.

• AD Position An ad at the top or center of a web page can get the most clicks compared to ads at the bottom or sides, as well as ads that are placed in search engine results and that the more their owners pay, the better their ranking and precedence.

• The title of the advertisement and the description of the meta description for search engine ads or the title and description in the advertising card of web pages, and the interactive and attractive visual aspect also have a great impact without a doubt.

Before moving on to other points, we'll explain the meaning of pay-per-click (PPC) ads to make the picture clearer and then move on to the concept of Quality Score, which has to do with the whole part with click-through rates and the relevance of the ad (Ads) entirely.

Pay Per Click ads

It is a set of ads whose owners (advertisers) pay the advertising medium, such as Google AdSense, who in turn pays you as a website owner, for each time their ads are clicked. The stage that comes after clicking is (completing the action process) such as purchasing, registering, or uploading.

These ads of course must be relevant to the content you provide on your platform, and therefore we can count the CTR as an indicator that pushes us to two options, either maintain the current pace of work or improve the performance of keywords and their compliance with SEO rules and landing pages, until we reach the launch of a successful advertising campaign for pay-per-click ads.

The impact of CTR on Quality Score

To know whether this ad is appropriate or not, we have to look at it from several angles, by evaluating it with a set of factors and elements called Quality Score, which are as follows:

• Quality and power of keywords performance.

• Approval of advertising and keywords for SEO rules.

• Landing Pages Are They Good?

• Click to show rate (CTR).

The impact of CTR on ad ranking

As we said earlier, one of the indicators of the ranking of your ads on search engines is the click-through rate, so this rate is what will determine the location of your ads on the SERPS page and based on which the algorithms of Google or the search engine whatever it may be will assume that any new set of ads you may want to publish will be similar to their previous counterparts! This means that ranking your ads today on the search results page will affect upcoming ads either positively or negatively.

CTR relationship to the conversion rate for online stores

What does CTR mean and how do you calculate it?

Many may mistakenly think that increasing CTR is necessarily profitable for online stores, but in fact, the factors influencing conversion rate are many and not limited to CTR, including:

• Take care of the product page by describing the product accurately and in detail, classifying the information about it, and prioritizing it.

• Offer certificates and warranties on products, especially sensitive products that require medical approval, for example, to gain the trust of the customer.

• Insert product properties by answering the most common questions, both existing and supposed to be asked.

• Reduce options and suggestions to avoid distracting the visitor, prompting them to go to the landing page, and then complete the purchase.

• Leave the visitor with the option to leave their required communicative information, to inform them of the availability of a product if they have run out of stores.

• Pay attention to the visual presentation of products such as photos and videos, so that the visitor experiences the product as if in front of him.

• Provide Robot Chat to provide professional and fast customer service.

• Transparency in dealing with and opening the fields of previous reviews and evaluations.

• Facilitate the purchase steps and make them more flexible and less numerous.

• The quality of landing pages.

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to the online store who have completed the purchase, and these may turn into permanent customers and affect the increase in the conversion rate in the long run, or their passage is temporary and affects the conversion rate instantaneously. It is the conversion ratio that represents the real number of customers, not the number of visits or clicks.

What is the ideal CTR?

They vary from one advertising platform to another, so we'll take Google AdSense as a model to determine that ideal percentage. Many people interested in the field see it as ranging from 0.5 to 10% while some see it as between 0.3 and 6%, or 2.88 is the ideal rate. But going back to the official website of Google Adsense we find it difficult to determine what the ideal CTR is, according to Google experts who believe that it is governed by the quality of Nitsch - that is, activity - SEO, and so on.

Google AdSense is advised to notify Google AdSense when the CTR exceeds the normal rate exaggeratedly and suspiciously because AdSense employees review your account whether or not they inform them of this. However, if you don't notify them, you may be subject to severe penalties up to the point of suspending your ad account, especially if they discover suspicious and deliberate activity to raise your CTR.

Although Adsense's assumptions may not make sense in terms of mathematical probabilities, they are inevitable. For example, if the percentage usually does not exceed 1% and then suddenly reaches 6%, it will be suspicious, although it may be spontaneous and unintentional, Adsense as we said is very suspicious in such cases, and there is no way but to keep up with it.

Ways to improve CTR

Now that we've seen the most important factors influencing CTR, let's dwell on the most important steps to improve CTR, which we'll rank as follows:

• Place the keyword in the ad link (AD URL).

• Add the word discount and its percentage in the headline of the ad as this will increase the demand for it even more.

• Use an engaging style in describing the ad. Overall, unleash your writing talent using methods such as:

• Call to Action: Get Started Now! Buy Now, Learn More... Etc.

• Strong words such as the style of addressing "you" or "you", and the words of affirmation "now", "top 10"... Etc.

• Addressing emotions, find out what will affect your customers emotionally and include it in the ad such as: "Say goodbye to back pain."

• Link your ad to an attractive and simple landing page with an explicit call to action, and avoid linking the ad to your site or store directly, because you will make the task difficult for the customer and distract him, and may get tired of the many steps to complete the purchase, registration or others.

• Emphasize narrowing down your targeting before creating an ad campaign, and elaborate well on the specifications of your target audience.

• Pay attention to the size of the ad and its features such as:

• Add a location if required, such as the advertised company, clinic, or office address.

• Action information such as contact information, such as phone number, email, or landline mail.

• Keep the ad link short and clear, so that it doesn't contain vague symbols, and is easy to memorize and read.

• Run an A/B Test for your ads before they are published, by creating 3 to 4 sets of them, to guess which is best and see if users click on them or ignore them, with tools like CrazyEgg.

Miscellaneous information about click-through rate

• 1. You don't necessarily have to be interested in calculating the ratio manually, because this is originally the prerogative of the algorithms and metrics of the intermediate advertising platform between you as a "publisher" and the party that promotes its products and services "advertiser", the most famous of which is Google Adsense.

• 2. In e-commerce, a high CTR is good for increasing sales volume, albeit indirectly, as mentioned above. It should be noted that CTR is not limited to web pages and online stores, but has an extension in areas such as:

• In Affiliate Marketing, in the case of affiliates, you have to increase your click-through rate to push visitors to take action for the product you're marketing for.
• Social Media Marketing.
• Email Marketing.
•  Content Marketing.

• 3. Ad clicks aren't always paid, and some or many of them are free. So the effective click-to-impression rate is calculated by combining the number of paid clicks with freebies, then dividing the total by search volume by a particular keyword, using Google Analytics and Google Ads Keyword Planner.

Now that we've answered the question: What is the relationship between CTR and monetization? We saw how this ratio, although there is no direct correlation between it and monetization, thanks to it, the new ads that we may add to our advertising accounts gain higher importance and rating on the SERPs search results pages.

In short, we can say that click-through rate is important to you as a "publisher" ad account holder, that pay-per-click (PPC) ads are more important to the "advertiser" in terms of practical promotional and to you from a profit point of view, and that both elements are related to each other, in other words, improving the click-through rate is the first step in launching a successful advertising campaign.