CTR in the Digital Marketing Jungle

As a person who makes his bread and butter online, I see the Internet and digital marketing as a great, big jungle. But not just any jungle – a very, very vicious one. Big cats rule the land here. They’re everywhere, and they’re hungry!

If you don’t understand how to make the most out of your efforts online, sooner or later – you’re gonna become their lunch.

It doesn’t really matter what you do or sell online, or how good your products and services might be – someone out there is always trying to get you. If you lose focus for even a second – the chances are, you’re gonna get eaten alive. Some big, angry tiger or lion is gonna catch up, clobber you to the ground, and then swallow you whole.

How come? – Well, because he can. He wants your place in the SERP as well as your customers. That nasty tiger knows you’re small and that you can easily be pushed out of the picture. Sometimes that cat in question is Google – other times your competitors, or even your customers/clients.

If you fail to provide your customers and site visitors with everything they expect – they’re going to leave. Your pack will abandon you, and we both know what happens to animals who ride solo through the jungle, don’t we?

Remember what happened in Jungle Book? – You don’t want your very own version of Shere Khan to chase you around. That’s why you cannot really afford to be careless with what you do online.

Unfortunately, in 2017, running and promoting an online business is no walk in the park. You cannot just prance around, expecting things to magically fall into your lap just because you’ve spent a few bucks on creating a cool website and campaign. Nope. The Internet doesn’t really work like that. It’s not like a Disney cartoon. This isn’t a type of jungle where animals help you with your chores. Bears and jaguars don’t sing songs here. They’re not really interested in protecting you from everything that’s willing to eat you or push you out of the way.

So, How Does One Survive Online? What do You Need to do in Order to Avoid Being Torn to Shreds by Vicious Beasts that Roam this Digital Jungle?

There’s only one thing you can do – focus on your CTRs.

Click-through-rate is the king of this digital marketing jungle! It’s the golden-haired lion that rules the land.

It is an extremely important metric for everyone who engages in any type of marketing online. Not only those who spend their days clicking and optimizing everything in Google Ad Words. Email marketing, organic search, social media channels, conversion rate optimization – these are all channels and practices where CTR is of crucial importance for your overall success rate.

There are a lot of benefits in chasing a high CTR

The higher the quality score, the lower the CPC – If you manage to maintain a remarkable CTR score, you won’t just save a lot of money on your advertisements – you’ll also improve your impression numbers. Every additional point you get in SERP is great for your business. If you position your creatives at the very top of your targeted search results, chances are – you’ll get a lot of mileage on your ads.  

Your organic results will improve as well – Having great user engagement will surely influence how Google looks at your brand. The more of your pages beat the average CTR percentage in your niche – the better chances you’ll have of appearing in leading search positions. So, if you want to move up in SERP and claim those leading positions for relevant queries, you should definitely focus on raising your overall CTR score.

Your conversion rates will also go up – If you figure out a way how to, for example, increase your CTR.

Good CTR numbers will actually help your chances of getting discovered by your targeted crowd – This is especially true with email. A lot of messages crash and burn, thanks to their poor CTR percentage. For example, if you don’t engage with most of the messages a certain brand sends your way – Gmail will figure out that you’re not really interested in that type of content, and it will immediately be relocated to your promotions or spam folder. Gmail regularly filters emails you receive on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. If your emails have great CTR numbers, then your messages have a better chance of actually being seen, opened, and clicked on by your recipients. If your CTR percentages are terrible, your emails will be rounded up and thrown in the trash.

Unfortunately, even though all this sounds pretty simple, important, and straightforward, optimizing your CTR isn’t really an easy task. A lot of different things come into play. Having a below average CTR can be soul crushing. Especially when you know that better click-through-rates are beneficial to your company on all sorts of different levels. The whole pressure of earning more site traffic, higher rankings and cheaper CPC tends to get people obsessing over all the wrong details.

In order to increase your overall CTR percentage, you should focus on the following things:

Create Better Content

Improving the quality of your content should be your no.1 task. Why? – Because it’s the only thing that actually communicates with your audience.

Your content is like a river running through the jungle where all sorts of animals come to drink water. If the river runs dry, the animals will be forced to look somewhere else.

As simple as that.

If your site content doesn’t offer your user everything they want from you, if your content doesn’t convince them that you’re the real deal – then they’re going to leave. They’re going to go somewhere else for answers. Some other cat will provide them with everything you failed to. This will naturally destroy your CTR.

That’s why you need to do everything in your power to create content that’s valuable to your crowd. You need to come up with blog posts, case studies, use cases, white papers, videos – basically everything that would be of interest to the people you want to visit your site. But this is old news. We have talked about this in our previous article: “The Shut Up and Take My Money Strategy”.

As someone who’s trying to climb up the ladder in SERP, you need to constantly solve problems for your readers, demonstrate your value, and everything else that makes you better than your competitors. You need to influence your readers in every part of your buyer’s funnel.

It’s your job to make sure that your content is far better than your competitor’s. If you want to become the golden-haired lion in your niche or market – you need to come up with 10x the content.

Leverage the Right Keyword

Focusing on the right keywords is of great importance to everyone who’s interested in improving their overall CTR. If you want to create smart blog posts, infographics, and advertisements that grab people’s attention – you need to make sure that they’re built around relevant keywords.

You want to target users who are already in the market looking for products and services that you sell. It’s always better for you, as a publisher, to create creatives that feed a particular ongoing demand, instead of investing in something that’s still looking to raise a particular level of interest.

Leveraging proper buyer keywords in your content and advertisements will surely help you skyrocket your CTR percentages.

Add Great Images

As the saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words”. This is particularly true in advertising. A great photo has the power of selling almost anything, offline and online.

People love strong pictures.

They love to absorb information through images.

The modern Web is a place where good and interesting visuals make all the difference.

Although content still plays a key role in SEO and getting people to spend more time on your site and constantly revisit your web address – visual content really is the one which ties the entire story together. It helps people make deeper and more powerful memories of your efforts. Terrific visual content does everything for the user. It stimulates emotions and helps them connect with your words, intent and creatives on a more personal level, and thus – drastically improves your CTR.

Go Big On the Text

Even though creating compelling and interesting visual content is of great importance, you still need to focus on producing smart texts. Yes, cool colors and graphics help catch a user’s attention – but they still don’t really have the power to successfully guide them through your sales funnel.

They provoke interest, but they do not sell.

This is where long, smart content comes to shine! Because Content Is King (Kong). 

That was a cheap shot, wasn’t it?

But I’m not talking about those annoying sales letters that go on for days. No. The only content that truly works online and helps brands improve their CTR is one where a certain writer does a great job of answering the most frequently-raised objections about his niche, products, and services.

It’s essential for your business that you continue to produce well-crafted and well-written content that serves to educate your users and relieves them of any bad thoughts or opinions they might have about your products, services, niche, or industry.

It doesn’t really matter if you’re working on a blog post, an ebook, or just another search/display ad – you should spend some additional time on crafting the right title for it.

Make Sure that Your Headlines Roar

Why are headlines so important, you ask? – Well, because that’s the first thing your target audience will see. If you don’t win them over with your headline, chances are – they’re not going to click on your text/advertisement.

Naturally, this doesn’t really mean that you should use your headlines to manipulate your audience to click on your site. As we already wrote in one of our previous articles: They used clickbait titles for SEO. What happened next will blow your mind! – Google is paying close attention to the quality of your articles and headlines. It’s time to stop focusing solely on vanity metrics and start thinking about things like how many people actually get what they need from your content and advertisements.

That’s why your headlines can’t be built around something that won’t be delivered in your content or ad.

Nothing has the power to improve your CTR like a smart and engaging headline.

It doesn’t really matter where you rank in SERP, if your headline is attractive – users will be drawn to click on it. The strategy behind this is simple – the better the headline, the more people will be provoked to engage with it and thus, improve your overall CTR.

Even though this all seems pretty straightforward, crafting powerful headlines is not really that easy to do. There’s an entire science behind this particular way of instantly grabbing people’s attention. Regardless of the fact that a lot of industry experts say that you should always try to stuff your headlines with important keywords, numbers, and a general sense of urgency – in my experience, the only thing you should really aim to do is come up with titles that feel relevant, natural, and what is most important – appealing to the users. You literally have to hypnotize them from the very start with your wit and expertise.

Luckily for us, the guys over at Copyblogger have dedicated an entire section of their blog to helping people learn how to design amazing headlines. Visit their site and browse through their amazing content. You’ll learn a lot, if you truly pay attention to their content.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post from top to bottom. I hope our latest article has provided all the necessary insight to help you improve your overall CTR and become the golden-haired lion of your niche or market.

That’s it for now,
See you again soon,

Best wishes,
Goran @ Four Dots