Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

Click through rate is a strange metric, most conducive to generating large profits for the advertising networks than anything else. I’m sure everyone reading this has had to explain ‘what is a good click through rate’ only to see the clients eye’s glaze over almost disbelievingly. Whilst CTR is a very soft measure of anything, one thing is for sure, a higher click through rate means cheaper click costs.

It’s something I have spent a lot of time testing across a number of networks, and generally ‘quality ads’ are classified as having the highest propensity to generate a reaction from a viewer. To start with let me explain the obvious. An effective ad is one that generates an outcome for the advertiser, not the network. I remember a ski chalet in New Zealand that I represented. We use to put the price in the ads to stop people clicking on the ads unless they were serious about purchase. What this meant was a very low CTR, but an enormous conversion rate. Needless to say this was the very opposite of what the networks believe in.

This being said, for most clients, click through rate is quite important, particularly against larger budgets where a $0.05 saving per click can mean tens of thousands of extra users brought through to the site. So as an advertiser we should always be planning tactics for generating higher attraction rate, a problem the Go Daddy marketing team have never been faced with.

What can drive up the CTR?
I’m sure most reading this will skip right down to this section, the strategy of CTR, and I’ll apologize in advance, there are no one solution fits all answers. The three pieces of advice I would give you are:

1.) Make sure your ads are different to the competition
2.) Run bonus offers to improve the value offer
3.) Create time urgency “Enrolment closes in 3 days”

Josh Strawczynski’s Opinion
Click through rate is an unusual measurement of advertising efficiency, particularly when you look at Google and the fact that they track CTR against blind historical benchmarks. The simple solution is try to be different, stand out from the crowd and don’t let your client engage a creative agency to do your job for you.