How to analyze your CTR at scale in 10 minutes

Intro

Hi, I'm Jens Lystlund, Managing Partner at Refyne Agency in Denmark. I’m a seasoned digital marketing professional with a decade of experience under my belt. Over the past 10 years, I have focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), specifically on creating more efficient ways of utilizing data in my daily work as an SEO consultant

Analyzing Your SEO CTR

Understanding and analyzing your CTR is one of the most untapped opportunities in On-page SEO that you will find. One of the main reasons why we might not see much effort into identifying opportunities for CTR improvement might be due to the fact that doing so involves quite a lot of work, as you will need to handle a lot of data to get it right.

However, analyzing and understanding your CTR does not have to be troublesome, which is why we have written this guide with a step-by-step approach on how to analyze your SEO CTR, without spending more than 10 minutes on the setup (I promise).

Learn more about SEO data analysis here

Why is SEO CTR Even Important?

CTR is an important metric, but I often find that there isn't enough focus on working to optimize the CTR for individual keywords. Instead, the focus is solely on achieving higher rankings on Google. But what is the value of three months of optimization to become #1 if the CTR is only 2-4%? The issue is that, in a situation where we have finally achieved a #1 ranking after extensive work, we fail to realize that the real work has just begun – and, unfortunately, we miss out on the enormous potential of improving your CTR.

What is a Great SEO CTR?

It is difficult to exactly tell you what a great SEO CTR looks like, as it greatly depends on factors like industry, search intent, and keyword competition. Generally, though, CTRs have been on the decline ever since the introduction of Google Ads into the search results. But even though CTR is generally on the decline, SEO click rates at the higher positions are still a very lucrative place to be.

If you work at an SEO Agency or in-house, determining your SEO CTR should be a task that you focus on. However, to determine a great CTR, we would need benchmark data to compare our own numbers with. Obtaining such data is not an easy endeavor due to limited accessibility, unless you happen to have competitors who love to share their data with you.

Instead of trying to determine if your CTR is great by comparing yourself to others, you should focus on comparing the CTR of your individual keywords to your own performance metrics.

By this, I mean that we want to achieve a better understanding of our current performance by creating our own custom CTR curve. Comparing this against our own metrics will help us determine which keywords are struggling, which ones are doing just fine, or which ones are performing exceptionally well.

The Manual Approach to CTR Analysis for SEO

One of the primary reasons why I believe the task of conducting CTR analysis is often not prioritized is because the manual approach is simply not fit for the job and usually never yields the results that you hope for.

The manual approach typically involves something like this:

1. Access Google Search Console: Sign in to your Google Search Console (GSC) account.
2. Check Performance report: In GSC, navigate to the "Performance" report to view your website's search performance data, including clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.
3. Analyze CTR by query: Look at the queries (keywords) driving traffic to your site and their respective CTRs. Identify high-CTR queries and understand what makes them successful. Also, pay attention to low-CTR queries and consider optimizing your content, titles, and descriptions for those queries.

The problem? It is not scalable, and in most cases, it is difficult for us to determine what a high or low CTR actually looks like. That is why you really need a more scalable and better approach to analyzing your CTR.

The better approach

By the end of this article you will be able to classify all your keywords by the following breakdowns:

• Branded vs Non Branded CTR
• Performance Brackets
  • Very Good: (+35% better than average)
  • Good: (Between +10 and +35% better than average)
  • OK: (Between +10% and -10% compared to average)
  • Bad (Between -10 and -35% compared to average)
  • Very Bad (-35% worse than average)

The primary reason why we make these classifications is that it allows us to simplify a large amount of keyword data and instead obtain views like this, which are much easier to take action on.

Setting up our SEO CTR template

To get us started we want to make sure that we have everything we need. For this particular approach we need access to the following:

1. The template used for the analysis
2. Google Search Console Data
3. Google Sheets
4. Wildcard: 3rd party tool to extract data if needed

Template Link:

To get us started we need fetch a copy of the template that we are going to use for the analysis. This can be done simply by clicking on the link below:

Ranktracker_CTR_Template

Once you have downloaded the template you will notice that the template currently has some dummy data in it, so that you can get a feel of what kind of the kinds of data that will be available to you once you set it up.

In the current version of the Google Sheet Template there are 2 tabs:

1. 💾 GSC Input: This is where we input the data from our own Google Search Console
2. 🔍 Analysis: Where the CTR analysis will be performed once we have our data prepped and ready for analysis.

How to get the required data from Google Search Console

Access the Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tool) and locate the account, website, or business for which you'd like to perform a bulk CTR analysis.

Open the correct account and navigate to the Performance section.

Click on "Total Clicks," "Total Impressions," "Average CTR," and "Average Position" to display all four data points. Then follow the clicks as described in the image next to it (above on mobile).

1. Go to Countries
2. Select your primary language (E.g Denmark)
3. Go to Queries
4. Download the report (to Google Sheets)

*If you have more than 1,000 queries that you want to analyze, I have included an additional section at the end of this article to address this issue so that you can still analyze your CTR. However, you will most likely need the help of third-party software to achieve this.

Next up paste the queries into the template that you downloaded in step.

You should place the downloaded Queries in the tab: **“1. GSC Input” **Specifically A4 which is also highlighted with yellow in the template. (Remember to remove the current dummy data)

Once you have done so you should be able see your own data presented in the tab: 🔍 2. Analysis

If you have set it up properly you should see something like this:

Here you have some filter options that should make your life easier, the options are explained below in the screenshot:

And voila you are ready to start fixing your keywords that are underperforming compared to your own CTR click curve.

More than 1000 Queries?

If you happen to have a lot more data than just 1,000 queries that you want to analyze, there are several options available to you. However, you will need the help of either a script to connect to the Google Search Console API or third-party software from vendors like Supermetrics

SuperMetrics: How do i pull this data directly into Google Sheets

If you are know to Supermetrics here is a quick step by step guide on how to install it and pull out the data that we need for the analysis.

How to install the Supermetrics for Google Sheets connector

1. Once you are in Google Sheets, navigate to the ‘Add-ons’ tab
2. Click ‘Get Add-ons’
3. Search for Supermetrics
4. Click on ‘Supermetrics’ and ‘Install’

How to get your data to Google Sheets

1. Go to ‘Add-ons’ — Supermetrics should now appear
2. Hover on Supermetrics and click on ‘Launch Sidebar’
3. Select the data source you want to connect. For this example, we’ll be using Google Search Console
4. Follow the authentication process
5. Select the dates, metrics (Clicks, Impressions, Average Position, CTR)and, dimensions (Query) you want to pull to your sheet
6. Click on ‘Get data’

Alternatives to SuperMetrics includes: TwoMinuteReports and Search Analytics for Sheets.

Once you have this data in a spreadsheet, copy it to our template in the same manner as explained above.

Remember that CTR analysis is just a single task in your overall SEO strategy. It's essential to consider other factors, such as keyword optimization, site structure, and backlinks, to ensure a comprehensive approach to improving your website's search engine performance.