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Click-Through Rates: Exploring Web Metrics in 2019


click through rate
From Pexels.com
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a KPI that details the “number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed”. Similarly, to Visit Duration, CTR is a helpful metric for businesses to track and understand using Google Analytics as it can be very telling of a link’s value to target users. 


CTR and Linking


Falling under the category of a visit characterization, CTR is helpful for determining how relevant internal and external links are to your users. Internal links are those that link to other pages within your own website and external links are those that go to relevant resources on other websites. In fact, the hyperlink added in the previous sentence on “external links” is an example of external linking and the hyperlink on “Visit Duration” in the first paragraph is internal linking to my other blog post. 

A CTR Experiment

An SEO company called 411 Local ran a three-month experiment on improving CTR across numerous industries’ websites. A change they tried implementing was including a discount or call to action in the SERP description of a page to see if that enticed more people to click the link from search engine results. Interestingly, the company found the results to be inconclusive as their control group sometimes performed better than the optimized group. 



Source: 411 Local, “Improving Your Website’s Click-Through Rate”

The chart shows a slight uptick in CTR for the test group, but nothing significant. A more thorough test would be 12 months long to accommodate changes in seasonality for various industries involved. If this three-month test was done in winter and a landscaping company’s website was involved, it would make sense to see a downturn in clicks during that season. 

This case study shows how important human inference is in determining the weight and validity of web metrics such as CTR. Someone needs to look at the data and say, “Hmm, why are these numbers the way they are?”. In this case, the time of year could explain why people were finding certain sites more or less relevant. 

Improving CTR
When it comes to a business’s website, one way that improvements to CTR can be achieved is by paying attention to industry trends and customers’ desires. For example, for some reason, fanny packs are now a fashion statement again. Clothing and accessories companies could capitalize on this trend by offering this product, or similar ones, and utilizing the key phrase “fanny pack” within the description to build relevancy. 

The Bottom Line
A website should be nurtured like a living being. It takes constant care and attention to pinpoint problems as they arise. Sometimes, like a diagnosis from a doctor, it takes a few tries to successfully find the root cause of a problem. It then takes trial and error to treat it. When it comes to CTR, a low rate is a sign that the content’s relevance to the target audience needs reworking. While this might seem like a painful process to troubleshoot, doing so will likely improve the CTR over time, which means more customer traffic. 

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Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 30, 2019 at 5:25 PM

    Bridget, I really like the look and feel of your blog page. Also, the CTR discussion is interesting - today at work we were talking about how to lead recipients from ads but also from printed collateral to our web site. It's interesting to consider that research on trends might be helpful. For example, people are seeking information on China a lot. If we post a social ad about how many China experts we have on LinkedIn ads, maybe we would get a high CTR?

    ReplyDelete
  2. KatherineNovember 4, 2019 at 12:54 PM

    Hi Bridget! I also wrote about CTR last week. Your blog looks fantastic!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chelsi BakerNovember 5, 2019 at 11:23 AM

    Great example of internal/external links!

    As a fellow creative, CTR discussions make me think of how to improve that metric through content and presentation. If the content is not relevant and does not point the audience to the right place in a quick enough amount of time, then it is hurting CTR and should be addressed. The same goes for how the information is presented.

    ReplyDelete

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