Below is some “Google Internal” data. About a year and a half ago, I asked one of my Google reps if she had Average CTR’s by Industry for Google Only. I was going thru some old files, and I found this ppt slide. It doesn’t tell me what companies were used in the accessment, and whether or not the PPC Keywords were more brand-related than generic keywords. Obviously, brand-related keywords would skew the results with higher CTR’s.
In a previous post, I discussed Methods To Increase CTR on PPC Ads. For example, things like position, keywords, ad copy, dynamic keyword insertion, etc. have an impact on CTR.
Campaign objectives make a difference. It depends on each advertiser’s campaign objectives. If they are Conversion-Oriented, then their Clickthrough Rates are most likely lower. Because, those are the advertisers that can have their ad in Position #7 and that’s their sweet spot for conversion rates.
As opposed to the Brand-Oriented campaign. In which case, findability is crucial to their campaign success. That means a Position-based success metric. Hence, higher CTR’s. Some of these brand campaigns use CTR as an Analytic Metric, so their is a heavy emphasis on optimizing CTR.
I was told that these are from large comprehensive PPC campaigns from industry leaders. I don’t think this can really be used as representative data for the Avg CTR for each of these industries. But, it’s interesting data anyway. 
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Solid info as usual… interesting they did not send you CTR of weapons industry
valuable info – would love to see some data on the travel vertical, but meh – we take what we can get.
Thanks
~Carrie
Awesome Information. Thanks for sharing this.
Does this mean that all the other industries measure below 5.67?
Cheers!
Good to see we are above average, but still we pay much more attention to conversion (opt-ins and sales) than we do to CTR – we’ve had some campaigns with awesome CTR, but pitiful conversion and others with low CTR but awesome conversion. I’ll let everyone guess which ones we still run today?
Great piece of information. I could compare my CTR with your figures and I am happy with my work. Thanks for making me feel good
Great article and awesome data… we would be interested in seeing the same data – only more recent
I don’t know… I’ve never in my life seen CTR’s at 8% in any industry. I have to call B.S. on that. That’s almost 10% of visitors clicking on an ad???
I’ve webmastered for lots of people, and that I have *never* seen. Occasionally there will be an unbelievable campaign that gets 2% but it’s very rare.
I have high traffic (tens of millions of pageviews per month) and I’ve never got much higher than .8% CTR. Usually I’m at around .3% – .5%
Thanks for sharing this.
Hard to believe that CTR > 100% is regarded as OK and achievable, as suggested on some other forums.
Great information. I think anyone with a CTR above 1% should be thrilled.
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