Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are one of the most common types of digital advertisements out there because they provide a company with a number of benefits from an increase in website traffic to producing a quick ROI that companies are searching for.  

As a company continues to run these types of ads, it is important to fine tune the process to spend the least amount of money while getting the most in return. A common indication of how a PPC ad is doing is the Click- Through-Rate (CTR). 

What is a CTR? 

As Search Engine Journal puts it “put simply, click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. If your PPC ad had 1,000 impressions and one click, that is a 0.1 percent CTR.” 

What does that .01 percent CTR tell a pay per click Dallas expert? That this ad was not effective at all. There are several different reasons that a PPC ad does not measure up from the wrong keyword being utilized to the ad being too vague. 

A CTR impacts not only the company’s bottom line, but the overall AdRank! Yes, search engines, like Google, have an AdRank just like ranking any content on their search engines. An Ad rank will determine the position of the advertisement. Ever scroll to the bottom of Google or other search engine’s SERPs and see an ad on the bottom. 

Well, the top position doesn’t go to the highest bidder but to the advertiser with the best Ad rank which means a company that has a track record of a good CTR. It is about the bottom line for search engines just as much as a company. 

Let’s search in Google “lawyers in Dallas Texas.” The first results that appear for this search query are ads, then the MapPack, organic ranking and more ads. 

What does this tell our pay per click Dallas experts? 

Well this could show that McClure LawGroup paid quite a bit more for their advertisement and has a better CTR rate than others on the results. On the other hand, there is another factor that one has to take into place. Yeah, it really is this difficult. A good, average or bad CTR is also defined on where the ad is running. 

As WordStream shows in this infographic, for the legal industry, a good CTR is 1.35 percent for search but for Google Display Network it is 0.45 percent. 

Source: 

The average click-through rate on AdWords paid search ads is about 2 percent and anything over two percent can be considered an above average CTR. 

While 2 percent is the average rate, it does not mean it is the tell-tale of the ad’s failure or success. A high or low CTR percentage could be the failure or success because every industry is different and it all depends! 

Our pay per click Dallas experts suggest for all companies who are investing into PPC ads to make sure to ask a potential agency, “how could we improve our current CTR?” 

You should always strive for a CTR rate higher than two percent, but it is a goal to shoot for when navigating PPC ads.