Click through rate or CTR is a way of measuring how well your Google Adwords marketing campaign is doing. The formula to measure click through rate is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad has been shown, which is called an impression. Each keyword along with the ad that is displayed will have its own unique CTR. Now what does this mean to your Google Adwords marketing account?
A keyword’s click through rate is a great indicator of how well your keyword relates to the user of a search query. A click through rate of more than 3% is considered excellent and highly relevant. Typically the more specific the keyword gets, the higher your click through rate will be, but does that mean that a keyword with a low CTR is bad? Yes and no. If you are selling Nike basketball shoes, and you are advertising on a keyword like Converse basketball shoes, and your CTR is 0.5%, I would say yes, you need to do changes. Searchers looking for Converse basketball shoes want Converse basketball shoes, which means your relevance to the user is low.
Now what about a keyword like basketball shoes? This keyword is searched about 600,000 times a month, so getting a 3% click through rate would get you 30,000 clicks, which is most likely not possible due to budget restraints. Is this keyword considered a bad keyword for your account if you had a 0.25% CTR? I would say no, because you sell basketball shoes, and it is a great starting point for a customer to see what basketball shoes are available. Now there are other factors to look at to see how well this keyword performs, but this is an example on how you can’t completely look at click through rate to measure the success of your website marketing.