Attention Adwords Experts.. Is This A Good Google Adwords PPC Click Through Rate Score...

3.6% is a fine score. An area where people disagree is how hard you should try for the #1 ad slot. In my experience, in that spot you get a lot of lower-quality clicks by folks that just click the first item, and don't necessarily buy anything. By targeting the 3rd through 5th slot, you get fewer clicks, but a much better set of buyers. The nice thing is that you are paying less for those clicks as well!

In any case, you should never be satisfied with any number. Always run 2 ads at the same time, competing them against each other. Once you get over 30 or so clicks, you should be able to see which one is working better. Pause the lower performer, and put up a new challenger ad. That way you can continually inch your way up higher and higher.

The actual CTR number is irrelevant and meaningless. What is important is QS. It is really a comparative measure of your CTR compared to competitors for your keyword. The baseline QS is 5 so anything below means your CTR is not as good as your competitors, regardless of position as QS accounts for that. Above 5, and especially 7 and above, your CTR is better than them. That's the number you should be looking at, not straight CTR which varies by position and keyword. You can have a QS of 10 in first position with an actual CTR of 1% while another keyword is a 5 with a CTR of 8%. It's all relative.

Well there are so many options with adwords now Google has been changing things which some of the stuff I find interesting. They have an experiment feature now which I do not get unless I were to experiment with it.

Yes it's a pretty good CTR keep doing whatever you are doing!

Adwords themselves consider anything more than 1% a good CTR.

Hi Joe,

3.60% is awesome and should have your quality score around 7+ in no time depending on a few other factors.
It should be known that if this is a competitive keyword, quality score will not help for long..

Big money always wins out in adwords in the long run.

Hold that 3.6 ctr as long as you can by writing great ads and testing, testing, testing.

Always remember the huge scam that adwords is once quality score was implemented.

"Its no longer an auction, it's based on forcing bidders to pay more more more.."

Think of it this way, and its the best scam ever.. =)

Once your CTR starts to drop because your not paying enough, your quality score will start to plummet...

This will eventually result in the dreaded message: "Keyword Rarely Shown Due To Low Quality Score"

Spend xxx amount to reactivate....

If you have been with adwords since the start you will soon realize CTR tied to quality score
is almost criminal behavior on the part of G.

People still have the wrong ideas about Adwords and PPC in general, despite my trying to educate people the last few years.

That's the first misunderstanding. QS is not a measure of how relevant an ad is to the site it links to. Like I said in earlier post, it's a measure of how well your ad is doing relative to other ads. For the same keyword at that position.

There is the keyword relevancy portion of the QS. But that basically means that if you use the keyword "widget", you better be selling widgets on that page, otherwise you are not relevant.

It has nothing to do with how well your site converts. The search engine's job is to provide the best and most relevant results - organic and ads - for the search term used. That's their job and if you have great ads that do that, they are happy. If the page doesn't convert, that's another matter and not something the search engines can control or even care about.


Obviously and totally agree. From the site owner's point of view, not the search engine.


No. As I am trying to explain, a good CTR is one that gives you a QS of 7 or more. A so-so one is where the QS is 4 to 6 and a poor CTR is one that results in a QS below three.


Again, not necessarily. First, click rate is heavily influenced by position. We don't know that position. The OP did not even tell us his QS. Quoting any CTR number means nothing and is not an indication of the QS you will have.

A 3.6% CTR is awesome only if the resulting QS is 10. It may actually be poor if his QS is 3 which would mean that competitors have on average much better ads (read better click rates).


No again.

By the way, before they implemented quality score, the measure was click rate. QS simply added a few other factors. In fact, I can't think of a PPC service that doesn't use their version of QS.

Bidders are not forced to pay more. Only those with poor QS and who don't understand it - those with the same ad all the time and not testing others - have to bid higher and pay more if they want to achieve a certain goal. Those who test and get their QS higher actually see their cost go down.


Maybe you'd care to explain.

Actually, it's a great way to measure quality. The only way. If more people click an ad rather than another, it is seen as having higher quality. Makes sense, no? Give me another metric that would do the same. Quality also has to be compared to something. You can't assign a quality value to something that exists in a vacuum. If I build something unique, I could say it has the highest quality of this type of product anywhere in the world. But that's not saying much since it exists nowhere else. Someone else could come along and build a better one. Only then could you compare and say one is of better quality than the other.

Google has made it clear they want quality and will reward quality. It's just a matter of advertisers understanding how quality is measured.