Focusing On Ctr For Your Adverts And Forgetting Conversions?

By Author: Giotto De Filippi
Total Articles: 12
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Most people pay a lot of attention to the CTR of their adverts, but not that much to the conversion rate of the advert itself (In my experience people seem to measure performance of adverts by CTR and performance of keywords by conversion rate).

In this post I will show an example to illustrate why this practice is wrong and will lead to wasting lots of money.



As you can see from the image above, I tried 3 differents adverts in this AdGroup, trying to improve my CTR and conversion. Since I cannot disclose the advert without risking to disclose the name of the customer I had to hide the advert, just note that just one word was changed in those adverts, and every time I chose a word that was more appealing to a certain segment of the audience for that keyword.

What is interesting to see is that the advert that achieved the highest CTR also achieved the lowest conversion rate. The CTR are all very similar, all almost at 5%, however the worst converting advert has ...
... a conversion rate that is less than half the one of the best converting advert.

Now the most important thing to understand is WHY it happens that the conversion rate of an advert is not necessarily proportional with its CTR.

Many people simply assume that you should have the highest possible CTR so as to bring as many people as possible to your landing page. Then from there they believe that every keyword has a certain conversion rate for a given landing page.

However the advert plays a much more important role in my opinion than just bringing as many visitors as possible to the landing page, its actually an opportunity to target the right segment for your landing page.

Lets make an example (since I cannot reveal the real keyword used in the example): assume you are selling laptops, you are bidding on the keyword laptop and your landing page is very generic.

You could for example try different segments in your advert:
- latest laptops
- cheapest laptops
- discounted laptops
- light laptops

The important point to understand is that those adjectives are not actual differentiators of the product, like for example saying Sony vs. Acer but they are actually things everyone want in a laptop (everyone want a new, light and cheap laptop, and everyone will be interested in having a discount if possible).

This means that of course if your landing page is about a Vaio laptop and you are buying the keyword vaio laptop then the best way to describe it for highest CTR and conversion rate is to include the word vaio in your advert, however here Im talking about a generic keyword like laptop or buy laptop with a generic landing page.

What happens by segmenting - by the example adjectives I provided - is that you target specific segments that might react differently to your landing page, without you being aware of it until you try.

Imagine for example that the prices on your landing page are very good, then probably cheapest laptop will have a higher conversion. It wont necessarily have a higher CTR (since the most price-sensitive people are not necessarily the largest segment of the people that search the keyword laptop) however itll convert that segment better.

So the success of this stategy will depend both on the size of that segment and its conversion rate. There is also another element based on the advert position that Ill discuss in another post.

Just to make the whole post very clear, lets use a simple metaphor. If you are looking for employees to hire thru an ad in the newspaper, if you want to receive as many calls as possible (CTR) youll just mention that you are hiring, but most of the callers will not be suitable for the job, so you wont hire many people (low conversion rate). The more you make your offer specific, the less calls youll receive (CTR) but the more those calls will be qualified and the more chances you have of hiring the caller (conversion rate). You may get less calls in the second scenario, but very qualified people that you might want to hire would never call for a generic ad, so if you want to hire qualified people (segment) you should specify it in the ad and youll be able to hire more overall (more conversions).

So the best thing to do is to try all these possible segments to see which one work better for a given keyword/landing page combination.


Giotto De Filippi is an expert consultant with both Adwords and SEO. He writes on his blog PPCHACKING.COM giving advanced tricks about how to get better results with Adwords. A lot of emphasis is put on the Quality Score technology Adwords uses. He has 10 years Internet Marketing experience and has worked both for very large corporate clients and small to medium business - consistently achieving noticeable improvements for his customers.