Why (and when) reaching your CTR as a KPI isn’t that important on GDN?
I bet you had at least one client who wanted to set Click Through Rate as a KPI for a GDN campaign and expected it’s success. Maybe you do that. They go by the simple rule — if we didn’t reach KPI’s, our mission is to find out what we did wrong and do it right for the next campaign. But, that isn’t necessarily important when we talk about the Google Display Network or Local display. And this is what your client (or maybe you) need to know.
As we all know, CTR is very important on Google Search network. It is one of the three factors of the Quality Score. The higher it is, the better — it means your ad copy is appealing to customers who want to reach your business or product. But when it comes to Google Display Network, a CTR of 0.3% can be very high and make you feel proud (if the traffic you’ve generated is good). Even though CTR for GDN is important, it’s not the KPI you should strive for. Working with some bigger brands, I’ve noticed that they want a higher CTR for a KPI on GDN, which is not the best metric we should use for this channel. It can be useful as long as you have managed placements which can generate clicks which you really want and preferably convert leads on your website.
But, when you want to reach your KPI by only setting Interests as your targeting method, you’ll notice that your ad is showing on all kinds of websites, and clicks that you receive from them are not necessarily good ones.
If you have a Display campaign like that, go to your Adwords account, and have a look at ‘Where ads are showed’ tab (under placements tab). You’ll notice that there are some strange websites which have high CTR (more than 1%). Very often, that CTR is not what you want — those clicks could be (and in many cases are) fake so websites could make money from Google Adsense and you don’t have any benefits of that traffic. With them, your average CTR is higher, but if you exclude them and leave websites which seem (or are) legit your CTR could be a slightly lower than the one defined in a KPI. Have a look at the legit placements you know and notice their CTR — from my experience, it’s mostly around 0.1% — 0.18%, and those ‘strange’ websites sometimes reach more than 5% of CTR. If you visit them, you’ll see that they do not seem legit when it comes to clicks.
But don’t worry, there’s a fix. Pick a KPI which will give you more insights about a quality of traffic you’re generating from GDN. For instance, focus more on conversions which can occur on your website, such as ‘GDN Campaign/Ad group name’ KPI — 20 PDF downloads’. KPI like this focuses on traffic which is generated from your GDN ads and already is on your website. You will get even more data from Google Analytics and have a better overview of your audience and your campaign performance.
CTR is not a bad KPI, but when it comes to a Google Display Network, you should strive for KPI’s which will give you better understanding of your campaign performance and audience. Don’t be scared to try new KPI’s for your display campaigns — soon you’ll find the ones which work better than reaching a target CTR.
