Impact Of Domain On Ctr And Conversion

By Author: Giotto De Filippi
Total Articles: 12
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CTR of course is very important since it'll have an impact on how much one will pay per click for a given position.

However as we have seen in a previous post (http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/01/focusing-on-ctr-for-your-adverts-and-forgetting-conversions/) the conversion rate that the advert is getting may be even more important than the CTR.

The right approach to write an effective advert is to understand that that adverts are made of 4 lines, and not just 3. The last line (display URL) is actually as important as the other ones.

This requires registering several domains, that can even be very similar, and have them mirror the same site. Then you just write the same exact advert (the first 3 lines) with the exception of the destination URL.



In the example above, you can see that the advert is exactly the same, except that the second domain contains the word cure. This is a website about a cure, and we have 2 versions of the domain, one that just contain the name of ...
... the disease, and the other one that starts with cure and then has the same disease name.

To make an example it could be like: www.CureFlu.com vs. www.Flu.com. (I cannot reveal the website of the customer)

Intuitively it would be pretty hard to guess that this can make a difference (except the fact that usually shorter domains are seen as more authoritative) but the difference is actually measurable. The short domain has a slightly better CTR (around 10% better) and a better conversion too (30% more).

So the moral of the story is that it may actually be a very good investment to register 10 or more domains that show the same site, and test the CTR and the conversion. In a very competitive area with low margins the domain itself may make the difference between making a profit and making a loss.


Giotto De Filippi is an expert consultant with both Adwords and SEO. He writes on his blog PPCHACKING.COM giving advanced tricks about how to get better results with Adwords. A lot of emphasis is put on the Quality Score technology Adwords uses. He has 10 years Internet Marketing experience and has worked both for very large corporate clients and small to medium business - consistently achieving noticeable improvements for his customers.