Understanding Clickthrough Rate and How It Affects Your Bottom Line
We don’t expect you to understand every aspect of what we do as home services marketers. But, the more knowledge that you can equip yourself with, the better suited you will be to effectively track the performance of your marketing campaigns.
There are certain elements that you as a business owner and client of a marketing agency deem important and use as a gauge to measure the efficacy of your marketing. Much the same, Google has metrics and components that they measure to hold us accountable as well.
Yes…we get it from both ends!
One of those elements that both you and Google should (and hopefully are) keeping an eye on is the clickthrough rate of your company’s listings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
This goes for both paid ads and organic results.
Let’s take a step towards understanding this metric a little better…
What is Clickthrough Rate?
Google defines clickthrough rate as a ratio showing how often people who see your ad or free listing end up clicking it. Clickthrough rate (CTR) can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads, and free listings, are performing.
Ultimately, CTR is the number of times users click on your ad or listing versus the number of times the ad or listing was shown.
For example, if your ad or listing was seen 250 times, and received 25 clicks, your clickthrough rate would be 10%.
The higher your clickthrough rate, the better your ad or listing is performing.
On the contrary, a low clickthrough rate is often a good indication that your ad or listing isn’t persuasive enough to entice the user to click to learn more.
A low clickthrough rate can most often be cured by tailoring the words of your ad or listing to speak more specifically to the issues that your target audience is experiencing.
What is a Good Clickthrough Rate?
Determining a good CTR is totally dependent upon your industry and the keywords being targeted with your ad or listing.
You may be shocked to know that, according to Hubspot, the average clickthrough rate across all industries is 1.91% for Google search ads.
And according to respondents from a survey conducted by Databox, the average CTR for organic search results (Search Engine Optimization) is between 3-5%.
Understanding the industry averages helps to make your expectations as a business owner a little more realistic.
How Does CTR Impact Search Performance?
So this is where I was telling you that Google also keeps an eye on how our campaigns for companies like yours are performing.
If you think of Google as a business (which they are) and the people who search on Google as their customers (which they are) then you can understand why it’s important for Google to provide the best search results possible.
If they notice that a particular ad or search result is being shown often but never gets clicked, they consider that result to be irrelevant and will show it far less often which ultimately means worse placement for you.
It is crucial that your paid ads and organic search results are;
- Showing up for the correct search terms
- Persuasive enough to convince the user to click and learn more
If your results show up for incorrect search terms, one of two things will happen. The user will either not click on the ad, or they will click on the ad and learn that it has nothing to do with what they are searching for when they get to your website or landing page, resulting in them leaving immediately.
If you don’t get the click…bad. If they get to your site and leave immediately…also bad.
One of our goals as your marketing partner is to target the exact audience who is in need of your services and craft the perfectly worded search results to entice them to click, and in the end, convert into a lead for your business.
It’s Beneficial to Understand for Yourself and to Partner with a Pro
Knowing how to judge the success of your home services company’s marketing campaigns is necessary if you want to have your finger on the pulse of your business.
That being said, knowing how to understand your campaigns is a totally different animal than being able to actually commit the time and execute the campaigns yourself.
It’s important to partner with a marketing agency that you can trust and rely on.
Visibly Connected has been partnering with home services companies like yours for over 11 years and we have literally made it our business to create successful marketing campaigns in the industry.
We’re always happy to help if you have any marketing questions and are available to chat if you want to learn more about how we can help you become more effective online.
