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Expected CTR being a part of the Google Ads quality score really irritates me and makes me not want to have a 10/10 QS. It basically just translates to “bid into the 1st position,” which would be downright suicidal in some industries. They should just replace CTR with expected Conversion Rate.
Essentially, in order to have an above-average expected CTR, there are very few options other than to simply bid into the 1st position, where CTR is high and bounce/conversion rates are abysmal. The reduced cost associated with a 10/10 QS is a drop in the bucket compared to having the lower CTR and higher conversion rate of consistent placement in positions 2-4.
I almost exclusively use single-keyword ad groups and, in spite of that, the conversion rate in the 1st position is still abysmal compared to position 2-4.
CTR is such a stupid, nonsense metric, too. It’s basically meaningless unless you’re getting a solid number of conversions and your cost per conversion is in a healthy range. I feel like the whole system is just stupid and it basically incentivizes people to NOT have a 10/10 QS
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10 Replies
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why would having a higher ctr cause ‘abysmal’ bounce rates? Usually, the only downside to higher ctr via bidding is the cost per click.
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CTR is the most important metric for Google. Google gets paid when users click ads. Their second price auction that weights by expected CTR (quality score) is pretty fair, maximizes their revenue, and gives a pretty good user experience.
Position 1 is special. It’s going to get clicked a lot by everyone. It’s hard to convert that as well as lower positions. With positions 2 and lower, the person read your ad and chose to click through. That’s not necessarily the case with position 1.
If you use Google’s bidding algorithms (tCPA or tROAS) it could sort this out people really in the market for your solution vs casual visitors.
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You need to appreciate that Quality Score relates to Google’s business, not ours as advertisers. It’s how they grade how strong the customer experience is in a given query, and the customer’s experience quality is [simplistically] measured by what they engage with most.
So if our placement comes with a poor CTR, that translates to a reduced the user experience on Google’s site, which Google punishes us for with a lower Quality Score. They want their product to be as good an experience as possible, and they let us advertise inside that experience if we’re prepared to offer similar quality content as their organic algorithm.
And the reason something more core to the advertiser’s business isn’t used instead, like conversion rates, is because advertisers in the same auction can define ‘conversion’ differently, resulting in wildly different conversion rates. But CTR remains the same regardless of what conversions advertisers are using.
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I kind of experienced the same, we’re doing high-ticket eCommerce, I’m running just the shopping ads for now, when I first kept the bid super low and having impression share around 20%, we used to get 15-20 clicks a day with 1 or 2 conversions which is 5-10% conversion rate, I bid high and we started getting top impression share in auction and got 60-80 clicks a day while conversion stayed at 1-2 and seeing high bounce rate. I’m not getting any idea how to scale, should I fix the description or add reviews have no idea how to get around this.
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Isn’t the expected CTR metric calculated in relation to ad position?
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You don’t need to get 100% CTR. You just need it to be higher than average on market
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The actual QS value used when calculating your ad rank accounts for the differences in expected CTR regardless of historical ad position. You’re not penalized for lower ad position with respect to your ad rank, OP.
[Link](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/156066#QSvAR)
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“expected ctr” not ctr. Its CTR according to position.
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No, you’re thinking about this wrong.
Google doesn’t come right out and say it, but the “expected CTR” is not simply the “average CTR” of everyone bidding on that keyword.
Take an extreme example like branded keywords. The reason you see quality scores 10 when bidding on your brand is because others will never see *nearly* the CTRs you will because you literally own that keyword.
It’s a good system.
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If you don’t care about CTR you really shouldn’t care about QS.
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