Click Through Rate

What is the "click through rate"?

The clickthrough rate is specific to the online merchant who uses services such as Google adwords as part of the online advertising marketing campaign.

The acronym is CTR.

If the retailers ad is shown 1000 times and 100 people click on the ad then the CTR is 10 percent. An ad that is shown once is considered to have gone through 1 impression.

Ads are always in competition against other online advertisements therefore a good clickthrough rate is indicative of a well formed ad which catches the attention of the customer.

Usually a good online ad will start with a strong keyword. For example the word "cancer" might be your keyword of choice. And your Advertisement might look something like:

Cancer
We have a cure
www.docstreams.com


Such an ad is likely to beat out another advertisement that is less inviting to online surfers such as something like:

Curative Probing
We have you covered
www.docstreams.com

The art of creating Ads that perform well and that get higher than average CTR's is called "keyword optimization".

While the keyword "cancer" is likely to cost more, perhaps much more, than the keywords "curative probing" the merchant might be willing to accept paying the extra premium in order to get more impressions.

The extra dollars paid to the affiliate publishers might be justified if the CTR is high.

Knowing this could help the publisher to gear their online writing towards specific keywords that merchants or retailers are willing to bid higher for.

This is all part of the SEO or search engine optimization online business of advertising.

BTW words and phrases that mention cancer generally go for about $2.50 while the keyword phrase " curative  probing " might auction off for a nickel.

CPC and PPC are other acronyms used by SEO marketing experts.

What is CPC and PPC?