Google recently gave search marketers another nugget to let them know how well they are doing — Relative CTR.  While it’s no help for your search campaigns, think of it as a quality score of sorts for your contextual targeting.  Relative CTR tells you how your click through rate stacks up against your competitors on the websites where you ads are showing.  It does this with an order of magnitude of 1, with 1 meaning your click through rates are just as good as your competitors.  If your relative CTR is .3X (as the terminology goes), yours are only doing 30% as well as your competitors.

Now you ask, so what?  I’m already doing everything I can with my creatives to maximize my click through rate.  Well, maybe you are, and maybe you aren’t.  If you are targeting multiple ad groups that are only a few degrees of separation away from other one another in terms of theme, Relative CTR might prod you to take top performing ad creatives from one ad group and put them in another, or vice versa.  Relative CTR is also a helpful metric to let you know how your brand-new ad group is doing.  If you’ve recently started an ad group, and your relative CTR is .3X, you know things are going to be an uphill battle.

In sum, make sure you have relative CTR check on your list of columns.  It is sure to be a somewhat helpful metric when you are optimizing your content campaigns.