billcale - 10:32 pm on Apr 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

In general, you need to know WHY visitors come to the pages of your website (if they come as the result of a search, then you have clues in your page title, headings and throughout your body copy). If the ads on your page satisfy the *why*, then expect clicks to be forthcoming. If not, don't expect too many clicks.

As an example, if your visitors come to purchase something, you need to determine if that something is available in the ads on your page. If they are determined as NOT coming to purchase something, generally expect a very low CTR.

A good example is Google's own often cited "image pages". These are generally very poorly converting pages - sometimes no matter how much associated text is on the page - because the pages are reached as a result of searches for images. In this case, a great deal of traffic may be generated but visitors may just want to look at the images, not necessarily buy and you'll get very few clicks.