Google Grants Ongoing Management Guide - Manual (Page 13)

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2. Sort by CTR
Next, let's sort the CTR column so that it's in descending order. As you may
know, CTR refers to the percentage of people who have seen your ad on Google
and clicked on it. A high CTR is good, while a low CTR can lead to a poor Quality
Score, which can prevent your ads from showing. Many of the changes to
improve your CTR will likely lead to positive changes in Quality Score because
CTR is an important component of Quality Score.
Once you've sorted your report by CTR, look for keywords with a CTR of 1% or
lower. When one of your keywords has a low CTR, this generally means that
when people search on that keyword, your ad isnʼt enticing them to click. A low
CTR usually indicates one of two issues. Here are the two most common issues
and ways to improve the keywordʼs performance:
o Overly broad keywords. Your terms may be too broad or general to be
effective. For example, the keyword “donate” is likely too broad for any
campaign, since it could be used in a wide range of contexts: donate
money, donate blood, etc. You can make a broad keyword more specific
and more effective by adding descriptive language to the term. If you run
an AIDS research non-profit, for example, you may want to use the term,
“donate to aids research.”
o Irrelevant keywords. If you notice that your keyword does not directly
relate to your ad text, you might want to consider moving this keyword to a
more relevant ad group. Or, if you determine that this keyword is unrelated
to your campaign as a whole, you can pause or delete this keyword.
For keywords with a relatively high CTR, you can use the Keyword Tool (found in
the Tools tab within your account) to generate variations and expansions of these
high performers. You will want to continually re-evaluate your terms to weed out
the keywords that are not driving traffic to your site and to expand upon those
terms that are bringing more support to your non-profit.