When you have a website and marketing running. It’s something every business owner wants to know. You are getting some leads and that’s wonderful. But how do you get more? We are going to chat about improving click-through rates across all your marketing campaigns in this episode for service-based businesses. Go grab a cup of coffee so we can dive into this topic.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
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Links to Previous Episodes & Articles
MMM Article – Data Analytics Is Necessary In Marketing Led Business Growth
MMM Article – Importance of Ranking Your Article In A Google Answer Box
Episode 48 – Data to Drive Marketing Decisions
Episode 58 Google My Business Review
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What we discussed:
- What are click-through rates or CTR?
- What’s a good click-through rate?
- What do you track Click-throughs on?
- How to improve your CTR
How To Increase Serviced Based Business Click-Through Rates
*Not ready to give this episode a listen just yet? Below is a rough transcript of today’s episode.*
You have a website and marketing running, you’re getting some leads, which is awesome. but how do you get more? Right.we’re going to chat about improving click-through rates across all of your marketing campaigns in this episode, specifically for service-based businesses. So go grab a cup of coffee so we can dive into this topic, Okay, so a little bit of housekeeping stuff before we move on, in the show notes on the website. So go to Inkyma.com, I-N-K-Y-M-A dot com go to the actual page for the podcast and you’re going to see links for product recommendations, articles, and podcasts that we talk about in here. And we also have a rough transcript of the entire podcast for you to re-listen to, just a word about product recommendations.
we are partners with many of the products that we recommend, here and in marketing masterminds, our actual educational blog, simply because we use. When we’re putting together marketing for our clients and for ourselves. so if you’re going to decide to buy the product clicking through and buying it through our links really helps us out.
We get a little bit of money back so that we can then keep creating all this wonderful free content for you to the podcast and through marketing masterminds. So please consider clicking on those links. If you decide you’re going to buy those. Okay. So now onto today’s subject click-through rates, or as they’re often known when you’re looking at reports or when you’re reading an article, CT, our click-through rates.
so what this is, it’s the total number of people. That’s all your marketing that then took action and clicked through to get the offer, to learn more, to do whatever it is you want them to do and shown to you as a percent. So in this example, let’s say a hundred people saw your Google, my business listing because they were searching for something that you provide.
And of those hundred searchers, five of them clicked through to your website. So your CTR for Google, my business is 5%. Simple math, math gets more complicated when you get into weird funky numbers and all that other stuff, but that’s pretty much what it is. So the reason we’re focusing on service-based businesses today is that lead qualification is a little more difficult in the service industry.
unlike retail e-commerce or products, right? They buy a product. Boom, that’s definitely a lead. They abandoned a shopping cart. They leave without buying. Okay, there are lead. They didn’t qualify. it’s easier to track. we track leads in a different way for service-based industries. And one of the things that we look at is the click-through rate, the CTR, and then we then take a deeper dive after that to see, okay, what action did they take next?
Where they just looking? Lou, did they actually do something? so that’s why we’re focusing on service-based businesses in this particular episode.
how do you know what your CTR is for a given campaign? the first thing you need to do is you need to look at your data and if you’ve listened to the podcast episode that I did on, data analytics, which is in the show notes, you’ll know. Why I love data so much. And we also did a blog article about data in marketing masterminds.
That link is in the show notes as well. And we actually have a table in there of, by data sources, what you need to collect. If you. Take a look at your data and make sense of it. So go check that article out to, in articles, we can just take a deeper dive and give you tables and statistics and all those good stuff after you’ve listened to the podcast episodes.
so we’re trying to couple, a lot of that up together, but what the data allows you to see is the total number of impressions, which is the people that saw whatever your marketing piece were. and then the people that clicked. So Impressions. if you’re sending an email campaign to a hundred people consider that a hundred impressions.
Impressions is really just like an overarching term, but it’s, eyeballs on what you’re doing. So invariably, when I start talking about clicks and click through and that kind of thing is I get,what’s a good click-through rate. That is a very, very tough question to answer.
because there’s no broad general answer. It really depends on. Number one, the tactic, right? Your click-through rates are going to be different for email. Then they’re going to be for like organic social media posts. Versus what happens on Google my business. Cause they all do different things. And then every industry is different, right?
Click-through rates are going to be different for someone who is selling to consumers directly versus someone who’s selling B2B. You can’t have the same click-through rates because the total number of people that you get to possibly have impressions. The sizes are different and then I even take it down.
Another level is it depends on your location, where you are, if you’re in a highly competitive market. And,they have five or six different companies to choose from your click-through rates are probably going to be lower than if you were the only game in town, depending on geographically where you are and what you’re doing.
That’s why it’s a very difficult thing to qualify, and then you can go even a step further than that. And you can talk about the audience that you’re trying to connect with. So let me give you an example of this, right? So let’s say you’re a plumber and you’re trying to connect with property management companies.
You’re sending out emails, maybe you’re doing digital marketing to just property management companies, your click-through. On campaigns. Like those are probably going to be much lower than if you were doing a campaign to people who own homes, but that lower click-through rate doesn’t mean that’s bad because then if you get one property management company, to talk to you to send you business, that’s 10 to 20 different houses versus a single home.
So that’s where that type of data, what you’re trying to do, who your audience is, who you’re trying to attract really is going to affect your click-through rates, right? less than 1% click-through rate on property management. advertisement could be huge for you. what I recommend is, yeah.
Pull some benchmark data for your industry. at least have a realistic expectation of where to be, don’t strive for a 50% click-through rate. When your industry average is 200. It’s just, you’re going to be disappointed for absolutely no reason. But then once you have that benchmark data, take a look at your data over time and your specific trends and benchmark against yourself the last six months, the last year, and then try to grow from there.
So now let’s talk a little bit about,Where are we going to track these click-throughs from? Cause I’ve talked about Google, my business email, I’ve talked about digital advertising, and the answer is all of them. So I’m going to kind of walk you through the top four, click types of campaigns that you’re going to want to pay attention to. If you’re doing them, I’m not saying you should be doing all of these. It really depends on your marketing strategy, but these are the top four and everything is usually some type of a derivative of one of these. so the first one on my list is Google my business.
I did a whole podcast episode on Google my business. Definitely go listen to that. The link is in the show notes and the destination. That you’re going to track the click-throughs of our, the website because your website link is there. if you have a scheduling tool, you’re going to want to track that and then telephone number clicks, especially for service-based businesses.
Cause a lot of you will want the consumer or the company to call you. Get a quote or whatever. and so all the data sort, all the data for, this is in the Google, my business insights as part of your backend of the panel. and I should mention here that if you go to the show notes, I put together a, a table with these campaign types, the destinations and the data source to track so that you can go and look at it.
So if you’re feverish actually writing notes, right? You can stop, just go to the shout-outs. the next one on the list is email campaigns, right? Email marketing,really great marketing tool. And you can do tons of different things with it. Sales funnels, newsletters, announcements, promotions, but all of that, you’re going to want them to click through and click back to whatever it is you’re trying to get them to do.
So that could be your website or very specific landing page on your website. Scheduling tool. they can click on your telephone number if you put it in there. they’ll also, if it’s in the email, they’ll click on your social icons more about you, or if you’re giving them something like a download, you can attach that PDF, to it.
And then that will track as a click. Or if they go to click to watch a video, if that’s what you’ve shared. So those are the different types of clicks in an email that you’re going to. Want to track for lead generation. And then, if you’re using a email system like MailChimp or constant contact, They will absolutely track all of that and put it in their reports of who clicked what, as part of that specific email campaign right down to the name.
So if you have John Smith and you sent him the email and he clicked on the download and he clicked on the telephone number, you’re going to see that data. So this is one of the many, many reasons why I love email marketing. So I don’t know if all campaign systems do that. but I do know if you’re looking to track it that way.
MailChimp constant contact. Both of those will do it. links for those are in the show notes as well. Next is digital advertising, right? So in digital advertising, you put an ad out there to a target audience, and then you want them to take some type of action because you’re paying for it. typically it’ll go back to a landing page where then they can click on more things.
As well, but you want to know how many people are seeing the ad and how many of those are clicking through to do something. The other type of ad that’s out there is where they can click on a telephone number to call. Both of these are, to telephone clicking. I know for a fact, as a Google ad, like in search, you can add your telephone number or in the display ads or the video ads.
Sometimes you can add a, telephone click extension to the ad. And so all of that data of how many people clicked through and opened it and did all that stuff. As part of the reporting inside of the, advertising platform, it comes with the ability to create the ad and then also to track and see how the ads.
And then the last area is search engine optimization and search engine optimization. It’s really all about the clicks. So whether you’re trying to get them to come to your homepage or you’re trying to, get them to read an article, however they find you obviously clicking through to the website is going to be that, CTR percentage that you’re looking at.
Now you can do this one of two ways, right? Google search console, which is less known to most people has the better data, right? Because it also gives you the search terms. And it’s really simple. This search term, it ranked here. This is the total number of impressions. And here’s how many people clicked through.
You can also use Google Analytics, which many more people are familiar with, but it’s harder to get to that data because Google analytics gives you everything. It gives you your paid traffic, your email traffic, the search traffic, the direct traffic, and then you’ve got to sort through on your own.
So if you just want to pull search on its own, I actually recommend going. Directly to the Google search console. It’s free. It’s just an, it’s a different platform that Google provides. So now that you know what CTR is and where you should track it, at least at a very high level, let’s talk about different ways to improve your click-through rates.
So first and foremost, Headings and subject lines. So it’s the text that people are going to see first. So how do you want to craft and create this text? You want to talk to their internal, emotional, problem and how. I saw it, right. Not the external problem, not the tactical problem, the tactical one’s a lot easier to, formulate language around, but you got to take another step and figure out what’s the emotion behind the purchase because we purchase emotionally first.
Even if you are a process, data-driven person like myself, you’re like, Ooh, I want that. And then you find your way of figuring out. How to find the right one and to justify it and paid for it and all that other stuff. But it’s usually an emotional decision first. so let’s go back to our plumber. Shall we?
so for a plumber, they could write something that says,if you need a new bathroom fixture for your master bath, call us. Okay. That’s true. That’s direct. But what if they did something like, Get a, master bathroom that is a luxury escape from the world, right? A lot of people see their bathrooms as a place to relax, rejuvenate generate.
they don’t take the phones in there. It’s, they’re a waste, it’s their escape. And so that’s the emotional need for spending the money to make a luxury spa type of bathroom with these beautiful, gorgeous high-end fixtures. the rainfall shower, head, and the beautiful glass doors and the wood I could just, oh my shoulders were coming down, just thinking about it.
so that is the difference between that external want need and then the emotional want and need. But the key is not to be too wordy. We can’t write a whole entire paragraph describing this environment. You got get it done really, succinctly. so for article headlines, you want to try to keep it at 60 characters or less, which is a little.
Because I’ve done it. and then for email, subject lines, nine words or less, and what’s great about things like MailChimp and constant contact. as you’re writing these, they’re going to say, Hey, this is too long considered trying to shorten it. So you don’t have to write that down and remember it, they remind you, right?
Cause they want your emails to get open just as much as you do, because then you’ll keep using their.
Now for search engine optimization. if you’re writing an article or you have a service page that you want people to find for specific keywords, it is about the keywords, right? You want to match the right audience with the right article or the right page. So using a correct keyword phrase, that describes what that page is for, is important for click-through rates.
if you do something like a quick. Yeah, you’re going to get a click-through, but honestly, they’re going to have a bad experience and leave and then your bounce rates go up. We won’t go into bounce rates. they’re important to the point is when you get the click-through, you want them to stay and you want them to do something else.
So ensuring that your keyword phrase is in the, title of the page or the title of the article and matches exactly is just the easiest way to improve your click-through rates for. Now for digital ads, places like Google, they actually have testing built in. They give you five different spots for headlines and five different descriptions if you’re doing a display campaign.
they’ll actually rotate and test the different combinations and give you the results of which ones are doing best because of the impressions versus the click-throughs. so they kind of do all that work for. Just be prepared. They have character limits. These boxes are really small.
so you have to be extremely concise in your language. And then for Google my business, right? What we’re talking about here for being, headlines and subjects really becomes your category and your descriptions of your business and your services. So to understand more why, categories and descriptions for all of that is important.
Go listen to that episode. I just did for Google my business, they talk in more detail about those sections of your life. So the next on my list are images, right? Images are super, super important. and you want those images to match the messaging that you just created with those headlines. So it’s headlines and then it’s images and the images should visually represent.
What you just told them with that subject, with that article, with the descriptions. cause you’re more likely to get a click-through, We’re visual people, we’re visual creatures. And if we see what we like in the image, we’re more likely to pay attention, to this. Now for service-based businesses, it’s a little more difficult, right?
You’re not selling a product. you’re selling a service. So what you want to try to go for is showing the end result of what your service provides with happy customers, right? People happy in the picture. It goes a really long way. So going back to our plumber, So in this example, the plumber could show a picture of a high end master bathroom that really focuses on the shower or the tub or the fixtures that the plumber is responsible for finding and putting it in.
Because this is what plumbing really means to a homeowner, right? They’re just assuming that if it looks beautiful and gorgeous like that, you turn the faucet and the water comes through like that it’s going to work, That’s supposed to be a given, at any plumber should be able to do that in their mind.
Now you, as an expert, plumber knows y’all are not created equal. and that turning that faucet, there’s a lot that has. behind all of that. But that’s not how you’re going to sell. You’re going to sell what the finished product representing visually, what that person is looking for as part of the process.
And then,Articles digital ads and emails, all the same information, whatever those headlines are going to be, whatever you’re doing, make sure that the images match. So now let’s talk about Google, my business, right? According to Google listings with images, get 35% more click-throughs to their website, then listings that don’t have images, right? So you want a lot of pictures, Google basically is telling you, show them pictures and they’ll come on through, for service-based businesses, you can definitely show befores and afters.
People love seeing those transformations. You can also show in progress shots if they’re really cool. some people like seeing those as well. And then of course videos, right? Images are great. Videos are always better. And in Google my business, you can actually upload videos as well. So take the time, add the extra images, and then as you get more, keep adding them.
And the last way to improve your click-through rates is tell them what you want them to do. You’ve created these great headlines. You’ve sourced all these beautiful images. Now tell them what you want to. I want them to do right. Don’t make them work too hard to become a customer. These are cold calls to actions and believe it or not, they’re usually missing you do all that work and there’s no really defined call to action.
And if you don’t have it, you’re going to get less click-throughs. and so call to actions. in the service industry, it’s not buy. It’s learn more. It is schedule an appointment. It’s call us. It’s get a free estimate. These are examples of really strong calls to action. And then where you can use a button with the language in it versus link text.
It just stands out more. It catches the eye a little bit more, for search it’s a little bit different. So if you’re trying to improve your search engine optimization, telling them what to do is really giving them the answer to what they’re looking for. so let’s say you wrote an article and you’ve got the title of the article there.
Perfect. What you want to put in that meta-description, which is those one to three sentences that show up directly under the title, put in there, what their takeaway is for what, the article is. So if it’s one of your service pages, start listing out the service, then maybe you put some call to action language in there as well.
get a free quote for this particular type of service. You don’t have a lot of space here either, right? Because at some point they’re going to cut you off, with what is seen, but you want to put enough in there where you start to answer their question or tell them what the benefit is for them, so that they do wind up clicking through.
The other thing you want to do is if it’s an article you want to answer fully, that question is high in the article as possible, because this is what helps you win the Google answer box. So if you don’t know what the Google answer box is. On marketing masterminds, we wrote an entire article about what Google answer boxes are, how they’re awesome and amazing for search engine optimization and how you do it.
so in the show notes, go and take a read of that particular article. So now that you know how click-through rates can help you with your marketing. Let’s talk about some next steps you can take to get there. So the first thing you want to do is look at your current marketing data for at least the last six months.
Hopefully, you have a year and see what your click-through rates are. And remember, this is going to be your benchmark. You are where you are at this moment in time. Don’t consider it good. Don’t consider it bad. This is where things are. To go off on a small tangent. There is. If you’re going to like.
Google search console, and you’re going to your email and then you’re going over to your ad data. You can make this process a lot simpler for yourself by creating a, what we like to call a dashboard report. This is what we do for all of our clients. Google data studio allows you to create data reports for your business and using a data aggregator like Supermetrics, which is paid.
So Google data studios free, but Supermetrics is paid, but allows you to pull all that data in, put it on one report in different sections. So you can just glance at it and see what your click-through rates are for email versus your digital advertising. You can see what your search data looks like versus your website data.
looking at all that data together in one place is extremely powerful. We did an article on marketing masterminds about how to track all of that data. So definitely go check that out. There’s a full table in there by source what data points you’re going to be tracking. So now that you’ve seen all your data, hopefully you’ve you created this report.
So you can see all of it. Now pick one thing to change across all of your different marketing tactics. Don’t go by marketing tactic and try to change everything all at once. Start with one. If you want to go through and change your headlines and your subjects to be more in line with what we talked about, do them for everything that’s important.
Or if you’re creating campaigns, start with that, because then the images flow easier. If you know what your headlines are. And then of course your calls to actions are going to be whatever your goals are that you’re trying to achieve with that campaign. Being focused on one specific thing to do versus one specific tactic.
It’s a lot easier, for your brain to handle process and focus. So here are my final thoughts for you on this particular topic. Data is super important, not just your click-through rates, but. All of the different data that I talk about in the marketing masterminds article about data aggregation and setting up the report, because it’s the way you understand how your marketing is working.
Is it working yes or no? You may anecdotally think it’s not working. You go look at the data and you’re like, wow, this is actually doing really well. Or you might have just one. maybe a specific type of email campaign. You’re not getting the click-through rates that you think you should be. and then you can go and make changes and then look at the data to see what’s changed.
This is really powerful. And if you do this across all of your different campaigns, you’re going to get more sales because you’re constantly tweaking and improving your mark. Here at Inkyma, we love to give back to the business community in so many different ways. we provide a 45-minute consultation for you to talk about your marketing with us.
And it can be about whatever you want to talk about. we talk about websites. We can talk about search engine optimization. We can talk about data. just go to the website in the upper right-hand corner. There is a schedule consultation button click on that. Pick your date and time, and you are on the calendar.
The website is Inkyma.com I-N-K-Y-M-A.com. you can also fill out the contact form if you’ve just got a really quick. Question that you need a really quick answer for, or if you have a show suggestion for us, I love getting show suggestions and giving you the content you’re looking for. As you know, we now have an educational blog that is designed to help you market your business by giving you product and tool recommendations, education on how to set things up tutorials.
we’ve added some video, educational programs and that is called marketing masterminds. So if you go to marketing masterminds dot C O, that is the blog, and there’s also links in the show notes. So hopefully you found this episode informative, helpful, if so, consider sharing it to other business owners that you know, so that we, as a business community can grow and thrive together.
Thanks so much for listening and have an amazing day.
