By: Jack Signorelli

I’m working with a company that at one point had a product that was not only best in class, but also technically far ahead of its competition. This company created a better way of offering its services and customers loved it and paid for it. Then senior management made a fatal mistake. They went out and asked their customers what features they wanted to see in the product and they delivered on those features.

Unfortunately for this company, its competitors didn’t ask customers what they wanted. Instead, the competitors had a vision of which features and business practices which would deliver greater value. Customers didn’t really see the value at first- until they saw the product. When they tried it, they loved it.

UBE is now working with a new client (TheCampusSocialite.com) helping them optimize their blogging website.  The site is fully functional and recently went through a major redesign.  Unfortunately, the blog writters did not work on optimizing their articles from the get go and they now find themselves with several thousand articles that need to be optimized for search engines.  Additionally, they are continuing to write articles and need to know proper strategy for those.

While this is a huge project, we are currently working on smaller parts of it.  Firstly, we are working on new articles that are optimized for specific topics that we hope will garner Search Engine traffic for the website.  The site already gets plenty of traffic through social media sources such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc but lacks in the organic traffic.   A good example to show how we are working to expand the site’s SEO is our work today....

What is CTR and how does it affect your Cost Per Click (CPC)?

Your Click Thru Rate (CTR) is calculated as follows:

Number of Clicks Received / Number of Impressions (times your ad is shown)

The CTR is an important Metric (unit of measurement) for your account because Google views higher CTR’s as indicators that your ads are more relevant to the keywords that people are using to search. For example, a well targeted keyword that shows a similar, well targeted advertisement is more likely to be clicked by a user and therefore have a higher CTR than a general keyword with a non specific advertisement.  In turn, higher CTR’s (along with other factors) will mean lower CPC’s will have to be to show in the 1^st position on Google...