Google Ad Grants: improve CTR with automated rules
One of the requirements for Grantspro is an account-wide clickthrough rate (CTR) of 1% over the past six months.
CTR is also a fundamental metric for the health of your Google Ad Grants account. CTR is an important factor in Quality Score, so the higher your CTR, the healthier your account will be, the higher your ads will appear and the less you’ll have to pay for your clicks. Cheaper clicks also means more clicks for your $10,000 a month.
You should be aiming to get a CTR of at least 1%. It’s weird to fail 99 times out of 100 and still call it a success!
If an ad or keyword’s CTR is below that 1% threshold and it’s had a fair amount of traffic (at least 200 impressions) or it’s been running for 30 days, it’s time to do something about it.
Our favourite tactic for keeping your CTR in good shape is to create an automated rule that runs every day at 23:00 and pauses any keywords with more than 200 impressions and less than 1% CTR all-time. This ensures that any high-volume keywords (especially broad matches) that get lots of impressions but few clicks don’t ruin your account-wide CTR and Quality Score.
Our Google Ad Grants survey showed that only 7% of charities use automated rules, so here’s a quick way to get ahead of your competition and set up your account to optimize itself.
1) Sign in to your Google Ad Grants account.
2) Click Campaigns at the top of the screen.
3) Click the Keywords tab.
4) Click the Automate button and select Pause keywords when.
5) Configure the rule as follows:
- Apply to All but removed keywords in all campaigns
- Requirements: CTR < 1% (less than 1%) and Impressions >= 200 (more than or equal to 200)
- Frequency: Daily 23 (i.e. 23:00) using data from All time
- Give the rule a name such as “Pause keywords with low CTR”
- You may wish to receive an email every time this automated rule runs for the first few days, but this will soon become white noise in your inbox, so we usually disable emails.
6) Click Preview results to see how it will impact your account.
7) Click Save.
As a regular maintenance task, we recommend reviewing paused keywords in your account. Check the search terms report for these keywords to see if you can harvest any of the search terms as exact match keywords and add them to your account. Also look out for negative keyword ideas. Then delete the paused keywords to keep your account uncluttered.
If you need to modify your automated rule later, you will find it under Bulk operations / Automated rules in the left-hand menu.
For more advice on getting the most from your Google Ad Grant, get your free copy of our best practice guide, ‘Unleashing Your Google Ad Grant’.
