Author: Tom Cottrill | Date Posted: Apr 12, 2022
Clickthrough rate is often a metric used in email marketing and social media ads, but it’s an important one that is actually spread across all marketing platforms since they all work together so frequently. This is especially true of your website, which is used across all digital marketing efforts in some capacity. Web design, when done the right way, can drastically improve your organic clickthrough rate on your search results, ads, and the rest of your marketing.
A clickthrough rate is a metric, measured as a ratio, that “shows how often people who see your ad or free product listing end up clicking it. [It] can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads, and free listings, are performing.” A CTR is calculated by taking the number of clicks your ad, search result, email, or post receives and dividing it by the number of times it was shown (or with email marketing, it would be divided by the number of emails sent).
This is an important metric to track because if a lot of people are viewing your ad, that’s great, but if they aren’t engaging with the ad or clicking on your search results when they come up, then there’s something in your content that’s missing the mark on relevance for your target audience, and that is a very crucial piece of information to have. This allows you to track what you’re doing and adjust accordingly if you see that your clickthrough rate just isn’t hitting the mark.
CTR is affected in the same way as many other marketing metrics, including:
When it comes to search snippets (the little bit of information a person will see when they scroll through the search results on Google or another search engine), many people don’t really realize how much control they have over what is presented. The information presented here can make or break your clickthrough rate.
Your snippet can be controlled in many ways, all of which affect the optimization of your website, but they also affect how many people choose to click on your listing.
Make sure your page title, description, URL path, and favicon are all relevant to the keyword for which they are appearing. The more relevant all this information is, the more likely your page is to rank for the keyword (along with the other 600-something ranking factors Google considers, but relevance is of key importance), and the more likely people are to click on your link.
A fast website that’s also optimized for mobile is important for just about every aspect of having a website, and we talk about it in just about every post we write, but that’s because of just how important it is. Its importance for CTR is no different. Even if a person clicks on your ad or search engine result, they will not click through your site if it’s slow, and chances are they’ll never come back to it again if it’s so slow they can barely load any pages. If it takes longer than 3-4 seconds to load, it’s going to lose people, and they won’t bother clicking through pages or navigating through your site if it doesn’t load. The same goes for making sure a site is optimized for mobile—if they can’t easily find things and navigate on their mobile devices, you’re going to drastically lower your CTR because of the number of users relying on a mobile-friendly website.
Make sure your media like images and videos are all compressed, your server and host are effective and quick, your site is cached and not overloaded, outdated and unused plugins are deleted, and everything resizes and positions itself properly on a mobile device (of all sizes and any browser). These may seem like common sense, but it’s all too often we see low clickthrough rates because websites haven’t been updated in years and aren’t optimized, losing a large number of users who want to be on the website at all. Measure your site performance to see where the current site is landing in the performance department, and then talk to a professional.
What we mean by this is simple: different types of content rank differently depending on the industry or type of product or service. This is why Google displays search results differently if someone is searching for a recipe for crab rangoons versus how they show up for a person looking for crab rangoons near them. One will bring up videos as a primary form of content, while the other will bring up map results as primary.
This being said, you need to make sure the right content is being ranked for the keywords you are trying to rank. If your keywords are searched by people looking for videos, put a lot of effort and optimization into high-quality video content on your site and YouTube, on which Google will place a priority. If your keywords are being searched by people looking for quick lists or written content, write high-quality blogs. Photo-heavy industry like it may be when selling a product? Optimize that shop page with high-quality images that will draw people’s attention right away.
Having the type of content you rank for certain keywords be high-quality and well thought out will improve CTR because it will fall in line with exactly what the searcher wants and how they want to see it.
Since 2013, Ignitro Studios has been working to blend marketing and technology in support of agencies and other marketers. By understanding both sides of web development, we have a unique perspective and advantage within the industry. We provide design, development, project management, QA, and strategy, driving the bus so our clients don’t have to. We will work with our clients to get results while also empowering them to do their job better. Learn more about Ignitro Studios.
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