When running an AdWords campaign there are two very important numbers that you want to focus on. The first is the click-through rate, which indicates the effectiveness of your advertising. The second is your conversion rate, which indicates the effectiveness of your site and your ability to capitalize on your marketing efforts. As far as the click-through rate is concerned, I’m usually satisfied if the rate is somewhere in the range of 5-10%. I also remember some of the material in the AdWords Learning Center referring to a similar range as a high CTR.

Well, I was just looking over one of the AdWords accounts I manage and here is some of the data that I saw:

The first row gives you the name of the columns (clicks, impressions, and click-through rate), the second row is the data for the whole ad group, and the third row is the data for the keyword that is performing the best according to volume of clicks. Now, what really puts a smile on my face is, not only is this keyword responsible for 52% of the clicks for this ad group, it is receiving an awesome CTR. A 26.53% CTR means that almost 1 in 3 people who see the add click on it. The whole ad group is performing well at a 12.36% CTR and there are even other keywords in this ad group that have a better click-through rate. However, would a CTR of 100% from a keyword with one impression really be that impressive? I don’t think so. For that reason I decided to highlight this one keyword that has a decent volume behind it.

An interesting thing about this keyword is that it is an exact match. An exact match is a word or phrase with the square brackets around it. This tells Google to only serve up your ad if a person’s search matches your keyword exactly. This tends to improve the click-through rate because you are being very specific in who you are targeting; however, it also tends to seriously decrease the volume of impressions and clicks because you are now excluding all of the many variations that may have been included under a broad match. In this case, the exact match of the keyword featured above gets about half the impressions that the broad match gets but also gets twice volume of clicks. That means that the exact match is four times as efficient for every impression.