How To Increase Your Click-Through Rate and Decrease Cost-Per-Click in Google Ads Text Ads

If you’re running text ads on Google, you know by now that CTR (click-through rate) is important. A good CTR correlates with lower CPCs (Cost Per Click) and it means your audience is likely interested in the ads you are showing. To get a good CTR, you need to learn about writing ad copy for search engines and correlating those ads with relevant keywords.

Improving CTR in Google ads has to do with 2 major factors: your ad copy and keywords. If your keywords are triggering carefully crafted and relevant ads on quality searches, you’re golden. You should see high CTRs above 5% and lower than average CPCs. If your keywords are triggering irrelevant ads, you’re likely getting uninterested eyeballs on your ads. This results in lower CTR and a higher cost per click on average.

How to Write Ad Copy That Clicks

After running literally thousands and thousands of ads, I’ve boiled down ad copywriting into one key principle: Give the people what they want.

When someone searches for, “AC Repair Tampa”, your ad better be screaming those words as loud as it can. That phrase should be the first thing that a searcher sees. After people type a search and click enter, what they are really looking for when the search results page loads is an affirmation of their search. They want to see the exact words that they searched in a link and know that the page they are about to go to has what they need.

Parts of a Text Ad and Their Importance

Headlines

The headline is the most important part of your ad and the focal point for users. Your ad descriptions could be terrible, but you could still get a high CTR with a carefully crafted headline. However, that doesn’t mean you should put minimal effort into your descriptions. I only said that to portray my point. When you are writing your headline you first need to know what keywords are contained in that ad group. We’ll stick with the “AC Repair Tampa” search as an example. Let’s say your ad group contains keywords like “AC Repair tampa”, “ac repair near me,” “ac repair carrollwood,” “ac repair westchase,” etc. You would want your headlines to read like the following:

Headline 1: AC Repair Tampa FL

Headline 2: Benefit 1 or Call To Action

Headline 3: Company Name, Call To Action, or Benefit 2

Descriptions

Your descriptions are important, but not as critical as writing your headline correctly. I’ll be honest, often times people don’t even read the descriptions because the headline is enough to get someone to click. That doesn’t mean you should skimp on your descriptions though. They serve another purpose. Full descriptions allow your ad take up more space on the page, increasing CTR. You’ll want to follow the principle of “Give the People What They Want.” You want to be very specific to the keywords and highlight your business’s benefits & features. For example, your descriptions might read like the following:

Description 1: Fast & affordable AC repair serving Tampa Bay Area. Free service call with repair.

Description 2: Emergency technician service available 24/7. Price match guarantee. Call us today!

Path Fields

URL paths are the text that appears after the domain in a text ad. These aren’t going to be huge drivers of CTR, but, again, you should fill it out to make your ad more prominent. You will want to label at least one of your path fields. For the ac repair example, this could look like:

Only Path 1:

Path 1: ac-repair

Both Paths:

Path 1: ac-repair

Path 2: “tampa” or “service”

These are only the portions of the actual text ad itself. I will go further into ad copy writing in another post about ad extensions and their purposes.

Now that you know how to write the actual text ads, it’s time to show you how to structure your ad groups, ads, and keywords.

How To Structure Your Google Ads Campaigns into Ad Groups

Ad group structure is the way in which you organize your ads and keywords. There are many ways to do it that result in high CTR. There are even more ways to do it that result in low CTR, High CPCs, and an unhealthy account.

The first thing you will want to do is hyper focus on your target theme. We’ll stick with AC repair.

An entire campaign should be built around AC repair with ad groups that are more specific to AC repair. I typically break the campaign theme out into ad groups based on keyword match-type and geo-searches. Here’s what I mean:

In the screenshot below, ad groups marked BMM only have broad match modified keywords, Ad groups marked PM only have phrase match keywords, and EM only has exact match keywords. The ad groups that contain “GEO” have keywords that are location based, sometimes called geo-modified keywords.

As you can see, these keywords are broken out into specific ad groups. They should be deliberately created in a manner in which the keywords are unique and each ad group will pick up a slightly different type of traffic. As mentioned above, each ad group needs to have ads created specifically for each ad group to get a high CTR.

If done correctly, when someone searches and triggers a geo-modified keyword, one of your geo-specific ads would show up for their search. Conversely, if someone searches for a non geo-modified keyword then the ad would not show the geo-modified term in the ad.

Have questions about this post? Send them to garrett@precisionpayperclick.com

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