What's a good CTR?

[Driven]

I only have one ad up at the moment, but as soon as the new website is done, I'll put up a total of nine (testing headline, price and guarantee: three of each). The current lone ad has a click-through rate of 0.03% with 12 clicks for the last week. That seems horrible to me - what do you guys think?
Is CTR important, or is total number of clicks more important? (I know in the end, sales are what's most important, but I want to be effective).

I think that more ads should increase that, and I know I wouldn't need many sales to survive with my muse - four sales a week would pay the bills.
Comments, please?
Thanks
Driven

[bd301]

Are you on the content network? If so that sounds about right... you can never expect a very high CTR there. But 0.03% may be a bit low even for that.

For search, that's extremely low - you need to do something about that or you'll be hit with a terrible quality score and your CPCs will go up.

In the end, both # clicks and CTR are important. But ultimately a higher CTR will be better to target vs. a higher # clicks because a higher CTR raises your quality score, which in turn lowers your CPCs and lets you get more clicks for less money.

[Vacman]

Generally if you're not on the content network then you should be aiming at around 2-2.5%.

You could try A/B split testing one ad against another.

Or try changing up your keywords, or taking some out.

[Driven]

Thank you for the replies!

Yes, the content network is "on." Some of my keywords are having a 0.81% CTR, and one has a 14.3% CTR (I didn't see those before, just the overall CTR, which was the 0.03%).
So removing some keywords will have an effect? What will it do?

Should I pause the campaign until the other ads are up?

One other question (for now lol): how do I get my site to come up in the search? If I put in the exact name, it comes up now, but if I put in a general search term, it doesn't (at least not in the first 40 pages!).

Thanks.
Driven

[storm33229]

After reading MUSE MATH I discovered that its suggested that 0.5% to 1.5% are decent click-through-rates for broad term advertisements. It also mentions that if you were to use more specific keywords and a well designed ad you'd possibly see a click-through-rate ranging more from 3% to 5%.

He also mentions that it's important to make sure that the cost per click is low, and the amount of ads and keywords is high.

I personally use: this site. (http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php)

I sit down and write up a list of as many keywords, brand names etc that apply to my business, service or product and then search for synonyms and other words that are similar or have a relative meaning. It is important to make sure that you are specific in your word choice, although it wouldn't hurt to cover some of the broader terms and phrases as these may still yield some traffic.

Do keep in mind that the more you pay per click, the higher your ad will appear in the ad boxes. The phrase "bid" isn't referring to who can use the keywords, but rather, who's ad shows first.

Hope that helps.

[EelKat]

my click through rate is usually about 300 a month with about 5 sales, and I think that's horrid; I know I should promote more, but so far I just have not been very motivated to do so... no one to blame but myself for that.

[zhongguohua88]

The average CTR is 1.5% and if you get over 10%, your ad will be shown in blue above the organic search results instead of being shown on the side with other paid results. Having a good CTR is quite important because Google calculates the position and the cost of your ad based on your CTR. Ads that are in the 1st position usually perform way better than the ads after them and Google uses this formula to choose the position: CTR*Average Cost per Click (in other words, the ads that make Google the most money are shown first). You might consider having different ads for different keywords.

A trick that worked very well for me is to have a dynamic display URL. If you type www.yourwebsite.com/{keyword:default} in the display URL, it will change {keyword:default} for the keyword the person searched in every search and it will increase your CTR because people will see their keywords in bold in your URL. For example, if you sell toys and someone looks for Pokemon on Google and sees your ad, the display URL will change to www.yourwebsite.com/pokemon and the user will be much more likely to click. If the display URL is too long (eg. if the user searched a really long term) it will show "default" or whatever you put after "keyword:" in the display URL. eBay uses the exact same strategy for their PPC campaigns. You might want to check with your webmaster to make sure doing this won't redirect 404 page.

Hope that helps.