The 5% click-through rate rule

Of all the Ad Grants policy requirements, this is the one that actually gets accounts suspended. Google asks for an account-wide click-through rate of 5% or higher, measured monthly. Two consecutive months below the threshold, and the account can be deactivated.

Why Google asks for it

The grant pays for clicks that Google could have sold. A low click-through rate means the ads are shown to people who do not want them — the account is consuming auction inventory and returning nothing. The 5% rule is Google's way of asking that the free budget goes to searches where the organization is a real answer.

What actually sets your CTR

The instinct is to rewrite ad copy. We measured 61,669 ads, comparing pairs that ran in parallel in the same ad group — same keywords, same landing page, same bid, different text. The copy explains 2.7% of the variation in click-through rate. The other 97.3% comes from which keywords and which page the ad group has.

The reason sits in the search terms report. Across the accounts we audit, 71.5% of impressions and 65.4% of clicks come from queries that appear on no account's keyword list. Your click-through rate is set by the queries you serve on, not by the words in your headline.

What to do, in order

1. Read the search terms report. Cut the queries that have nothing to do with your organization, and add as keywords the queries that fit it. Those are the only phrases with proven auction entry.
2. Add negatives surgically. The free rule is narrow: a query with at least 20 impressions and zero clicks. Across 269 accounts that covers 1,608 queries and costs not a single click. Cutting the whole long tail of loosely matched queries would cost about a quarter of all clicks — that tail still clicks at 9.0%.
3. Check dynamic ad groups. They are the single biggest CTR drain on accounts below the threshold. While they do up to 45% of account impressions they cost about 1% of CTR; once they pass 70% the loss reaches 4.4%.
4. Keep brand groups on exact match. Broadened, they start serving on generic queries and eat the buffer you need above 5%.

What not to bother with

Cleaning out keywords with no search volume looks productive and is not. In a typical account those phrases produce no impressions at all — removing 99,386 of them across our whole portfolio moved the median account CTR by 0.007% and cost 8,114 clicks. Click-through rate is managed on search terms, not on keywords.