Comparing Your Ctr With Your Competitor's Ctr On Adwords?

By Author: Giotto De Filippi
Total Articles: 12
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When working on competitive keywords having a good CTR is extremely important. So it would be very useful to be able to tell if your CTR is better than your competitor CTR, and by how much.

Some people may just think that its simple and all you have to do is replicate the advert of your competitor (with his display URL of course) for a given keyword to find out the CTR.

In reality its not as simple as one may think, most people think that what determines the CTR is the advert they write, however this is very far from the truth. The most important factor that determines the CTR of an advert is the position. So basically a very poorly written advert in position #1 is most likely to have a higher CTR compared to a very well written advert in position #10.

So what we really need to measure is the CTR for a given position.

The position depends on many factors, for sure those 3:

Bid amount
CTR
Quality Score


The problem with the way the Adwords interface ...
... is done is that what you see as position is actually the average position. This means that if the advert appears once on position #1 and another time on position #10 the average position will be #5.5

The main issue with this is related with the fact that the competitive landscape of Adwords
is completely different according to country, language and time of the day. Whereas in some countries there may be 10 competitors, in others there may be zero. Which means that the average position (and so the CTR) will depend more on where the searches that displayed your advert have been performed rather than the quality of the advert itself.

What Ive found to be an effective way to compare the CTR (note as you probably understood this is NOT about determining the absolute CTR of your competitor, since this is impossible if you dont manage to show up exactly in the same position and in the same countries but determining if your CTR is higher or lower than your competitor) is to make an AdGroup and put 1 keyword, the one you want to know the CTR of the advert for (for newbies: of course we can speak of CTR only for a given keyword, the keyword will probably be one of the most important factors in determining the CTR of an advert). Then you add 2 adverts, one is yours and the other one is the one of your competitor (with the competitors display URL). Now if you search with Google that keyword, in any country you want, and you refresh your search, youll see that the 2 adverts are rotating (you may have to refresh a few times). What's interesting to see is that the position is almost always exactly the same. This may be due to the fact that in order to determine the position to give to an advert Google is not using the CTR of the advert, but rather the CTR of the keyword, which average the CTR of those 2 adverts. So by doing this you guarantee that both adverts will show in the same position, and avoid the problem you would normally have by using 2 AdGroups of having the best performing advert move up and increase its CTR even more and the worse performing advert move down and its CTR declining even further.

It you want to do an even more comprehensive CTR analysis I also suggest to try varying the bid amount, so that you can see if the CTR difference is consistent across positions.


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.