Optimising My Campaign

Once your campaign has been running for at least 3 days or has served 1,000 impressions (whichever comes first) then you should start “optimising” your campaign.

To do this, simply look at what your overall CTR is for the whole campaign, and then remove any individual element that doesn’t hit that CTR.

For example, if your campaign is running at a 5% CTR overall, then you should probably remove any keyword/site/ad which comes in below that (which has served over 1,000 impressions). If removing everything below 5% will make it hard to deliver your full budget, then consider only removing anything with a CTR below 3% to start with, and then move up to 5% later.

If you do this process every few days at first, and then every few weeks, and then every few months you will increase your CTR to it’s best possible average after a while.

It may take some time, and it may seem like you are wasting time by doing it this slowly, but if you are patient about it your long-lasting results will remain much better than if you just move all of your budget to your best performing keyword immediately.

WARNING: You should keep in mind volume when optimising your campaigns – if a keyword/site/ad is just below your CTR average threshold, but is providing a large amount of the impressions you deliver, it may be worthwhile to keep it going.

Summary

Optimising Definition

Find out more

Next: Conversion Tracking

Explore more on

Advertising campaign Click-through rate Conversion marketing Online advertising Pay-per-click Search engine marketing
Add Search Engine Land as a preferred source on Google

Editorial disclosure

Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

About the author

Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land is a daily publication and information site covering search engine industry news, plus SEO, PPC and search engine marketing tips, tactics and strategies. Special content features, site announcements, notices about our SMX events, and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Search Engine Land.