Can adsense stats tell us how good our page is

Clickthrough is a vote against

[surfgatinho]

I was looking at the stats for my various channels the other day and there is quite a substatnial discrepancy between the Clickthrough rate on the various channels.

Obviously where the ad is placed on the page is a factor but assuming an ad has the same prominence on a page does the Clickthrough rate not represent whether a user liked your page or thought something else looked better.

Another thing I wondered is can you make the adsense page open in a new window - or more to the point do Google penalise this. I haven't tried so I haven't looked into how it would be implememnted.

[2oddSox]

Clickthrough is a vote against

I can only speak for my own (content) sites, but I think the opposite is true. I work hard on the content of my sites and hard on the SEO factor to get very targetted visitors. AdSense, for its part, seems to work hard at getting the right ads on my site which, in my opinion, compliment the sites rather than detract from them. If a user finds an ad of interest and subsequently clicks away I'm more inclined to believe that I'm getting the right kind of visitor and hopefully the AdSense advertisers are also. I don't sell products on my AdSense sites so it would be a natural progression for my visitors to finish with the site and then want to go shopping - if that's via AdSense then all the better.

[justinf]

same deal here. One of my sites is highly targeted and ultra-niche. the ads that come up are directly relevent to my content, so if i get a click thru , that means i'm getting the right sort of visitor.

My other , more generic site, gets an average CTR of about 1%, whereas my highly targetted, ultra-niche site gets a CTR of between 2.5 and 3.5%, and is the biggest adsense revenue generator , despite the lower traffic.

[ken_b]

It depends on what you want your visitors to do once they land on your page.

If you want them to click on ads, then more clicks equals a better result.

If you want them to visit more of your own pages, a high Adsense CTR may be an indicator that you have some work left to do.

[europeforvisitors]

Obviously where the ad is placed on the page is a factor but assuming an ad has the same prominence on a page does the Clickthrough rate not represent whether a user liked your page or thought something else looked better.

Depends on the page.

If the page has nothing of value on it, then the user may be clicking an ad in lieu of the back button (which may or may not be good for the advertiser).

If, on the other hand, the page has provided information that puts the user in a buying frame of mind, then a high clickthrough rate may be a direct result of high-quality content: e.g., an informative product review, destination article, cruise or hotel review, etc.

Another thing I wondered is can you make the adsense page open in a new window - or more to the point do Google penalise this. I haven't tried so I haven't looked into how it would be implememnted.

You'd have to change the AdSense code, and that's a violation of the program policies.

[longen]

On my content site some of the "best" pages have the lowest CTR and earnings. I've realized that i have two types of page: Reference and Human Interest.
Visitors to the "reference" pages, which took so long to compile, seem to just collect the "fact & figures" and then leave. On the "human interest" pages they leave via adsense.

[yosemite]

Well, I am proud of all of my sites and "sections" (I have sites with several different "sections"—themes or topics). The one that gets the most clicks is also the most popular of my sites, and is quite thorough on the subject it covers. It gets lots of links from schools and libraries (it's an educational site). I want to believe that it's a good site.

The CTR is not astronomically high, but it's okay. I like to think that people click on the ads because the information on my site has made them enthusiastic and in the mood to buy stuff.