With the increase in online advertising, one of the things our clients frequently want to know is how to measure the effectiveness of their online ads. While there are a number of good measures, the simplest and most commonly used benchmark remains ad click-through rate (CTR).
So What’s a Good Click-Through Rate?
Since this is the next, and most obvious, question, we’re always ready with some answers. The first answer is that a good CTR is heavily dependent on a number of factors. Assuming most factors are generally equal, though, we can provide the following insight on targeted CTR for some of the most common online advertising options.
Search Ads
Location: Search Engines (Google, Bing, etc.) 
Media Type: Text
Primary Target: B2C
Good CTR: 3% to 6%
Display Ads
Location: Display Networks (e.g. Google) or any website 
Media Type: Image
Primary Target: B2C
Good CTR: 1% to 4%
Facebook Ads
Location: Facebook 
Media Type: Image and Text
Primary Target: B2C
Good CTR: .1% to 1.5%
Twitter Ads
Location: Twitter 
Media Type: Text (promoted Tweets)
Primary Target: B2C
Good CTR: 2% to 4%
Linked In Ads
Location: Linked In 
Media Type: Image and Text
Primary Target: B2B
Good CTR: .03% to .1%
Improving Your Advertising CTR
Here are a few factors that can have a significant impact on your advertising CTR.
- Ad Targeting
- Ad Copy and Keywords
- Ad Creative
- Type of Offer
- Industry Competition
- B2B vs. B2C Audience
With that said, there are a number of additional factors that can affect your CTR and describing them in detail is probably a good topic for another article.
2 Comments
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Thanks! This is really useful. It’s hard to find good information on what to expect on CTR. This is particularly true for the social media options.