Longer Headline and Tips to Improve Click Through Rate

If we see tons of traffic pouring in and not enough visitors are seen over the website. A common question pops in mind why the Click Through Rate is down? This drop in Click Through Rate could be brought about by following reasons:

• Adtext is not appealing.
• Lower average position resulting less clicks and reduce in CTR.
• New/Existing player bidding aggressively in the market.
• Lower Quality Score.

All these above scenario could be improved by improving the Adtext by improving the message being delivered. Increasing the CPC could result into better average position and resulting into more Clicks. The quality score could be improved by tightly targeting the adtext and keywords and also tweaking the landing page. New player keeps coming in market and existing player would become aggressive at times this could be difficult but google adwords automated rule could help overcome this. To improve the CTR please follow the tips mentioned below:

• Continous A/B testing to improve the AdCopy.
• Ensure the CPC bid would leave towards Top 3 spots where the click density is high.
• Include Sitelinks this would improve the presence of Adtext and resulting in improved CTR..
• A proper call to action.
• The message in the AdCopy should match the content of he landing page.

Example of AdCopy -

The above AdCopy could be improved. But before the new AdCopy is placesd it is recommended to do A/B testing over the AdCopy.


An example on the way ti would be displayed for short headline.

Longer Headline in AdCopy - 
Google recently started providing the Headline which is longer than 25 Characters. The longer Headline is more appealing providing To qualify for this longer Headline certain criteria should be met. Now having said that I would lie to rephrase that it is in fact not a longer Headline, but it is more of less of presentation of the AdCopy. Will this help? Yes, study shows that having longer headline improves the chances of CTR. It stands out and is more appealing than the Short Headline.

Minimum Requirements to meet longer Headlines requirment -

• Description Line 1 should end with proper punctuation.Example - Period, Question mark and Exclamation mark.
• Enough traffic for the search term which allows the ads to appear on the left side of top 3 spots.

Example -

It is seen that having a longer headline text would improve the CTR between 3% to 25%. On average a 7% improve in CTR could be seen across both non-brand and brand terms. This improvement in CTR could be assumed to be as a result of better user experience and visibility of the PPC advertisement over Organic result. The key take away from the combination of headline should be that the description Line1 and the headline should provide enough information for the people to click on the Ads. The Line 2 would serve as secondary information which AdCopy is trying to deliver.


Longer headline, it is the combination of Headline plus the description in Line 1.



Beside the longer headline which is the combination of headline and Line 1, it seems there are some results seen which infact has headline longer than 25 characters. It won't be surprising if it comes into picture sooner or later.