CTR VS click

[shaun]

Does any one can tell me in google adwords, should we focus on clicks or CTR?

[abbottsys]

Originally Posted by shaun

Does any one can tell me in google adwords, should we focus on clicks or CTR?

Both. Clicks tell you how much traffic your ad is generating, and the CTR tells you how "efficient" your ad is (for a given keyword) at generating the traffic. Your next step would be to measure conversions and cost/conversion.

[chris1]

You should focus on how much revenue your ads are bringing in compared to your spend.

[akintosyali]

Ad copy CTR hands down. G makes money by displaying ads that get most clicks. (Actually, it is more like CPCxCTR, so an ad that has $1 CPC that has a 10% CTR is same to them as a $.5 CPC ad that has a 20% ctr. )
So focus on your ad ctr (at least initially, to build your QS) , and Google will reward you for it..

[lizcamps]

Definitely CTR. You could get more clicks by spending more, expanding your campaign to more keywords and Content Targeting... but would those be the *right* clicks? They may not be.

CTR gives you a better diagnostic about your campaign. Plus akintosyali put it succinctly and correctly above.

[shaun]

Thx for all you guys' idea. It seems that I really should focus on CRT. However, if I want to improve my CRT, I both can improve my Clicks and decrease my impr...
Do you think it would be a good idea to shut down content network to decrease the impr?

[Discovery]

Content ads have no effect on your search campaigns in regards to CTR or Quality Score.

#1 What is your goal with the campaign?

Branding? Conversions?

In Branding
I may lean heavily on the content network and push hard on the social networks for millions of impressions with ads that have little call to action to click on it.

IE: high CPC bid on an ad containing company name & phone number. The ad may fall off the rankings after a bit.


Conversion Goal is more involved and trickier.
I work backwards from what others suggest here.

Business Goal: total profits, incremental growth, other.
I let this business goal determine the proper CPC based on historical data and many times gut feel, this equates to a projected number of clicks. The trick is to balance the number of conversions with a CTR that Google will deem as a quality ad.

The use of small targeted campaigns with strong negative keywords can keep the impression rates down, CTR high and help you hit your business goal.

This is the view from 6 thousand feet, there are many variables that you will need to consider, but its important to have the proper view on the strategy of your campaigns before you delve into the details.

Discovery

[akintosyali]

If you are a small shop, I'd say start small, and stay focused -on PPC. Work on your ad copy a lot, make sure you ads are as relevant as possible. Your ads will play a huge role in your ad ctr. Also, make sure your ad groups are small too. The ad copy for red widgets may not work as well as ad copy for blue widgets. Pay attention to your negs - use the Google tools/ or your own stats program to see what type of queries drive the larget amount of traffic, and see if there are any phrases in there that would not be applicable to you.. Once you have your PPC campaigns humming, you can then switch to content. Content is a whole different animal, and it gives you additional tools for optimization, like ability to exclude traffic from domains that do not convert well. (I wish Google had this for their search network as well...)

[shaun]

We are running an adwords campaign for a Franch surfwear shop. actually, our goal is to try our best in Google Online Marketing Challenge and get a nice score for an university unit assignment. We may did something wrong, in terms of killing content network...

[TigerWoodsOfSEM]

It sounds like you're mainly interested in achieving a high CTR, however, it would still benefit you to identify your goal. What is your grade based on? Just CTR? Click volume? Both?

You can keep your content network on, just make sure you have separate "content only" campaigns, which you can set up through the campaign settings. Utilize the Placement Performance report to help optimize your traffic on the content network.

Be sure to use keyword insertion in your AdText, this will help your CTR dramatically. Also, quality score aside, if you are interested in CTR only, you may want to consider using phrase and/or exact match rather than Google's broad (expanded) match.

[shaun]

It is funny, but we dont know how google calculate our grade...
Could you please give me more details about keyword insertion?

[Trace]

When creating your text ad you can use {keyword:default] and Google will automatically insert the keyword you are bidding on in your ad. If the keyword triggering your ad doesn't match up well enough it will trigger the default you put in.

Some additional things to note:
The capitalization of {keyword} will change the way it is inserted. Keyword will capitalize the first term it inserts. KeyWord will capitalize all terms it inserts. More information on keyword insertion in text ads can be found here.

Dynamic keyword insertion is tricky and you have to try it out and test it to make sure it is doing what you want it to.

[Bergman]

Originally Posted by shaun

Thx for all you guys' idea. It seems that I really should focus on CRT. However, if I want to improve my CRT, I both can improve my Clicks and decrease my impr...
Do you think it would be a good idea to shut down content network to decrease the impr?

You don't need to skip the content-part of your campaign, but a good rule is to divide it on two Campaigns in Google AdWords - one purely search-related and one purely content-related. You can follow-up your campaigns much more effectively, and it is easier to fine-tune your ads, since the behaviour of the users of the content-network and the search engines are quite different.

(This isn't my own invention to make this division, I have learnt it from AdWords-guru Perry Marshall - the writer of The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords.)

[crocwatcher]

A note on quality score for keywords - many folks will tell you that once your quality score drops to poor you should trash that campaign or adgroup and start over since you can't raise a "poor" to "ok". this is not true! quality score is based in part on average ctr for a given ad/keyword combination. If your quality score just recently went to poor and you have 2 ads running, one with a decent ctr and one with a weak ctr, pausing the weak ad will raise the average ctr for the keyword and after a time will raise the quality score back up.