The only thing I can think of is when someone uses a specific keyword in a search query and then they click on your ad when it shows up for that search query, that keyword gets a 'click' and through that, it gets assigned a CTR. Is this right? Close? WTH?
you were right there. the individual keyword gets the CTR as the person used that phrase to trigger your ad.
The ad CTR is for letting you know how well the user perceives you ad compared to the keywords in your adgroup. Is it good (high CTR) or is it bad (low CTR)
To get a positive CTR someone has to click on your ad.
Say you have 1 keyword which has 3 separate ads that can display when someone searches for it. Your ads are shown equally (if you select it) so you can guage which ad performs the best for this keyword.
If you only have one keyword in this adgroup your "keyword CTR" will be the same as the average CTR of the 3 ads.
If you select the "optimise ad serving" then adwords automatically uses the ad with the highest CTR to be shown after a period of time, which in turn would improve your overall "keyword CTR"
When i said trigger i mean, if someone searches for wiget, and this is your keyword, your ad is shown (triggered by the term the user searched for)
It makes sense to me but if you need more, i'll try to go into more depth for you.
In Adsense, CTR is defined simply as a percentage of how many times ads are clicked on vs. how many times the ad is displayed. 5 clicks on ads out of a total of 50 ad impressions = 10% CTR. Simple.
Can you explain 'keyword CTR' along these lines? What exactly is 'clicked' on to produce the click count and what other factor is that click count measured against to produce the keyword CTR?
(edit)
"To get a positive CTR someone has to click on your ad."
Woops. Did you edit that in afterwards or did I overlook that? Okay I think I'm starting to get the picture here..
You can have many different keywords that can show your ads.
Say 100 key phrases will trigger 5 different ads.
When someone searches for one of your keywords, one of your 5 ads will be displayed. If someone cliecks on this you can get some CTR score. Both the keyword and the ad get this CTR score.
If this keyword is used again, a different ad may be shown. It may not be written as well as the other one which was clicked on so the user clicks on another competing ad. No CTR score.
Based on this information if there were only 2 seaches for this keyword, one was clicked and the other was not, your "keyword CTR" is 50%, ad 1 CTR is 100% and ad 2 is CTR 0%
Does this make any more sense?
Another question.. (not sure if I should start a new thread)..
If I'm starting a new ad campaign, how can Google assign a minimum CPC bid if I haven't generated any keyword CTR for my keywords yet in order to calculate the Quality Score?
Thanks,
SEM Expertise
[edited by: tedster at 8:56 pm (utc) on May 8, 2007]
Because google has millions and millions of searches done, they have enough data to estimate a keywords minimum score themsleves.
Some people think that they are taking the long tail away by doing this as the lower volume terms can sometimes have extremely high minimum bids.
It's just something we have to put up with.
