Why CTR Is More Important Than Rankings!

There’s a common misconception that being at ‘Number 1’ whether it’s on the Ads or the Organic Section will generate you more revenue, more enquiries, more profit and so on. In fact, that’s not necessarily the case.

To pay to be at the top of Ads costs a lot of money, and so that eats away at your margin, and thus makes it so it’s not necessarily profitable.

So what we want to focus on today is what we call Click-Through-Rate (CTR). So in order to get the CTR – you take the number of impressions and divide that by the number of clicks that you receive.

Being at ‘Number 1’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get clicks thus doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have a high CTR.

So Why Does Click-Through-Rate Matter?

Click-Though-Rate matters because you want to maximize the opportunities to get more clicks for the people searching for your products or services.

So How Do You Do That?

You’ve got two options – you’ve got a Title Tag and a Meta Description and of course the URL – so there’s actually three items that show. The Title Tag is the clickable part of the search result.

Within the search results, there are many different websites – Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon – all filtering through in different ways, so that’s why I say that CTR matters more than position.

In terms of position lets say that:

• Number 1 has a Click Through Rate of 10%.
• Number 2 has a Click Through Rate of 7%
• Number 3 has a Click Through Rate of 8% (so it’s actually higher than Position 2)

So Why Is This Important?

As we try and optimise a website further up the results, which for us, isn’t our primary goal – it’s to actually to increase the CTR as the primary (then Conversion Rates as the secondary) – we can see that it incrementally becomes more difficult (to achieve higher positions), it’s not the same as trying to increase from page 100 to page 50. It actually gets really challenging because of the fact that there are so many different factors.

So Why Does This Matter?

Let’s say that you and your website is shown 10,000 times per month within the search results. Of those 10,000 times, let’s say that you get a CTR of 1%, (because you’re not always showing in the top positions). In many cases, you could be showing further down the results, even on page 2 or page 3 (which do get clicks, despite what many people think). It’s all a numbers game and maximizing that CTR.

So for this example, your website is shown 10,000 times and you get a 1% CTR. That’s not very many considering that you had 10,000 opportunities. So for this example, let’s say that the conversion rate for your website is 1%.

You’d need 40,000 opportunities and it would take you 4 months before actually reaching a sale. So let’s say that we change the 1% to 5%, very quickly the number of visitors to your website improves.

We can see we still have the same number of people searching and the same number of impressions – we can’t change that.

We change which keywords, search queries and search terms that you try and target, but we can’t change the number of people searching on a monthly basis. So with this in mind the volume stays the same, the CTR changes you get more visitors. Let’s say we also work on your conversion rate and we increase that to 5%. You can see we’ve gone from 1 enquiry to 25.

I hope that this has provided you with a useful insight into why CTR is a more beneficial metric to measure success compared with rankings and position.

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