The Forgotten Factor for Click-Through Rate

Predikkta allows you to test different variations of URL in one survey. Results so far have shown that variations of URLs impact on CTRs.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DISPLAY?

Let’s first take a step back and look at how the URL in Adwords works.

If you create an Ad in Adwords, it gives you the option to fill in the destination and display URL. The destination URLis the URL of the page where you want your visitors to land. The size of the destination URL can be up to 1,024 characters. On the other hand, the display URL is the URL that is shown in the actual Ad and can only contain 35 characters.

The destination and display URL should be seen separately, but the domain name of the display URL should always be the same as the domain name of the destination URL.

Depending on the length of your domain name, you can play with the characters of your display URL. For instance, ifwww.flower.com is the domain name of your website, then you have 21 characters left to display. If you use these 21 characters cleverly, it can make a significant difference on the CTR.

INSERT KEYWORDS

Adwords best practice is to try and insert the main keyword you target in the display URL. This is because Google often emboldens the keyword if it matches the search query.

Let’s say that www.flower.com is a florist based in New York; possible variations could be:

• www.flower.com/Florist-NYC
• www.flower.com/Two_Hour_Delivery
• flower.com/Affordable_NYC_Florist
• www.flower.com/Florist-New-York
• www.flower.com/Free_Delivery

Adding the keyword in your display URL may be seen as much more attractive than only showing the domain name, as it can give more information about the page behind the URL.

HYPHEN OR UNDERSCORE

Advertisers on occasions separate two keywords with a hyphen. This is because a hyphen between keywords is commonly used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as it is considered best practice. Advertisers can blunder in using this as a guideline in their Adwords campaigns.

There are also other possibilities to separate keywords. For example, the use of an underscore is often beneficial, as per our initial results. The experiments show that URL variations with an underscore have slightly higher Click-Through Rate than variations using hyphens.

TO WWW OR NOT?

This can be the case if, for instance, you have a long domain name and need every character to insert your keyword phrase in the URL.

Someone searching for “Wedding Photographers” is more likely to click on:

We can only speculate why there is a significant difference in CTR between displaying the www prefix or not. Our intuition is that showing the www prefix looks trustworthy to visitors; hence visitors are more likely to click on your Ad.

ADWORDS OPTIMIZER

We are only starting to get significant data and we need more results to confirm these trends; however we didn’t want to hold upon sharing this with you.

Try the Adwords Optimizer yourself. At this stage it is still a Free Tool. Find out which URL, Headline and Description makes your customers click.