2 Ways To Increase Shopping Ad CTR

2 Simple Ways To Improve CTR On Your Shopping Campaigns

Improving your CTR is one of the best things you can do to improve the performance of your shopping campaigns.

Let me explain why with an example.

Two competitors are running ads for the same product, are bidding the same amount, and have the same conversion rate of 2% for a $50 product.

They both get around 100,000 impressions per day on their ads for $1000 in spend.

Store 1 has a 0.8% CTR, meaning he gets 800 clicks, and 16 conversions. Netting him $800 (a 0.8x ROAS).

Store 2 has a 1.4% CTR (only 0.6% higher). He gets 1400 clicks, and 28 conversions, netting him $1400 (a 1.4x ROAS).

So just by increasing the CTR by 0.6%, store 2 is more profitable than store 1, can now bid more competitively, and take more and more market share from store 1.

So let me now tell you how to improve your CTR.

​1. Get star ratings on your ads.

Trust is a big factor when getting someone to buy a product from your store.

Furthermore, people want to buy what other people are buying.

Having product review ratings on your shopping ads fulfils both of these. A good rating means people trust you, and if you have a lot of ratings, then people are more curious and keen to buy your product.

To set them up you'll need 50+ reviews.

Then follow these steps.

1. In Merchant Center go to Growth > Manage Programs > Google Product Ratings > Enable

2. Go to this URL (link)

3. Follow the instructions and fill out your details. Depending on what reviews aggregator you use, you'll either have to upload the reviews yourself, or enable the setting inside the aggregator. Either way, the software you use will have instructions for this.

Once you've completed the form, it can take 1-3 days for Google to reply to you and enable product reviews.

Once they do, it can take another 7-14 days after you've uploaded the your product reviews for them to start showing on your ads. So it's best to start doing this sooner rather than later.

​2. Test Different Product Images

When you search up a product on Google, there's often 15-20 different shopping ads that show up.

The largest part of the ad is the image. And so it's probably the biggest lever that you can change to improve your CTR.

Here's the process to follow to test different images:

1. Setup a supplemental feed in Merchant Center for the products that you're advertising.

2. Add the image_link column to your supplemental feed. This allows you to easily change your image by just inserting a different image link in your supplemental feed.

3. Search up your products using 'I Search From' and see what other advertisers are doing with their images. You want to do the opposite (or at least something different).

4. The biggest tests you can do are changing your image from a product image to a lifestyle image. And then also testing different colour backgrounds.

5. Edit your product images, and then upload them to Shopify. Now copy the link to the image and paste it in the image_link column of your supplemental feed.

To evaluate the results of changing your image, you want to wait for at least 1000 impressions as this tells you if it's a significant difference.

​Actionable Tip

1. Analyse the CTR of your top-performing shopping campaign. You want to be hitting at least 1%.

2. Get a more in-depth breakdown by looking at your CTR per product.

3. Are there any products with <0.5% CTR? If so, test out changing the image + title to improve it.

4. The easiest way to test changes to titles + images is using a supplemental feed, so set one up in Merchant Center.

Hope this email was useful.

Myles

P.s. I’ll do an audit of your account for a $199 fee, and if you don’t see an ROI from the changes I recommend within 14-days, you get a FULL refund.

Interested? Then click here to work with me.