- Online Advertising
- 11.16.2015
How To Increase Your CTR 10x and Cut Your CPC in Half
We all know that a PPC ad campaign can become a total money pit if you're not careful. But they don’t have to be if you know what works. And we know what works; dynamic and engaging graphics-based ads are, bar none, more successful than static, text-based ads. Just to prove our point, take a look at these stats from two PPC ads, one static and one animated, that we ran recently...
CASE STUDY: RAY Apartments
We ran a Pay-Per-Click campaign for one of our clients, Ray Apartments, a lifestyle apartment community in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. The Ads were geared towards a Lease-Up incentive that Ray was offering; “Receive a $2,000 visa gift card if you prelease by May 31st”. We’re always frustrated with display ads CTR’s, and we (as an industry) should be! The average CTR is .12%!?!? That’s beyond bad. I hear people brag about a .4% CTR… what we’re about to show you is how we got a 6% CTR!
We ran the ads via GoogleAds Display network and the ads clicked-thru to a landing page on Ray’s site (RaySeattle.com/Rent-Specials) (Show Still of Website) where the user was prompted to call the leasing office, as well as fill out a form to begin the process of applying for a unit.
Static |
Animated |
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The first ad we used in the campaign was static. With this ad, we saw 37,150 impressions with only 370 clicks, a CTR of 1%. With this lame of a CTR, our CPC with the static ad was a whopping 19 cents! |
Our Animated Ad pretty much blew our static one out of the water. Overall, there were 124,999 impressions with 4,558 clicks, a CTR of 3.65%. With this method, we were able to drop our CPC down to 8 cents, less than half of the static ad’s CPC. |
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The Takeaway (so how do we cut our CPC in half?!)
Rich Media can be your secret weapon for boosting your Quality Score and lowering your CPC...
- REMEMBER: user experience affects your Quality Score!
- If you’ve already done your “Go-To” Quality Score boosters (Keyword research, landing page optimization, and refining ad text, etc.) then what tools do you have left?
- ...Please don’t say “bidding higher”...
- THINK ABOUT USER EXPERIENCE...DUH!
- If your ad is dynamic and engaging for the user, they are more likely to click on it, thus upping your CTR, upping your rankings, and lowering your CPC!
- While both ads had equal relevance (same keywords/landing page) one out performed the other because it was animated which provided a better experience for the user
- Use a bid budget management tool like Acquisio. Helps your business save $$$ and increase you overall ROI!
- In short, if you spend a bit more time on the front end crafting a dynamic and engaging rich media ad, it can go a long way to lowering your CPC
People are inundated with thousands of marketing messages daily! As such, we’ve learned how to ignore ads. Thus, you must find a way to get noticed. The web is a dynamic medium, so why are you using static images to gain your target market's attention?
“The bottom line is that Rich Media Ads outperform their static counterparts, period.”
Founder Jason LaBaw - Bonsai Media Group