Unexpectedly high CTR

No problemo? Or?

[desi_curry]

I just started adsense last month on my site which is 6 years old now. The results are very exciting. Now I am planning to go full time by making new sites and investing on writers. But today I am bit worried because my CTR for search results are showing around 50%. My average CTR is around 14% and the maximum it had gone prior was 30%. Should I inform google about this? Just due to this kind of fear I have hardly told about adsense to my friends even. Please suggest!

[Dantol]

Take it easy. CTR fluctuates greatly with adsense.

PS: How many daily page impressions do you have?

[wyweb]

anytime you have doubts.. send them an email. Whatever happens you'll at least have a "paper trail" of correspondence. It may come in handy at some point.

Spikes in stats aren't uncommon. It may raise some eyebrows and someone may look into it but if you're guiltless it'll be okay. If you're worried then send them an email. Describe everything as accurately as you can without emotional interjections or suppositions on your part...

[Dantol]

But today I am bit worried because my CTR for search results are showing around 50%

One more thing: it will balance itself out, it's only the beginning of the day. Wait until midnight.

[Critters]

All depends on your impressions... changes in CTR of 20% would not be uncommon if you are getting < 20 clicks a day.

However if you are getting 1000's then something may be up and best pop G an email just telling them that you have spotted this spike and if there is any info you could provide them to help investigate it.

It never hurts to email G, it is good to build up a flow of emails with any company. That way if anything does go wrong they will have emails on record showing you are 'on the ball' in terms of complying with the TOS and possible click fraud.

But never panic...

[EricGiguere]

A high CTR may indicate that your site is being used by others for click fraud. Like the other posters have said, the best thing to do is email adsense-support and express your concerns. They'll investigate.

BTW, it should be easy enough to spot if it is click fraud. If you see successive accesses to the same pages on a continual basis, no referrer headers, etc. Google can actually filter for these kinds of things, too, if they have enough data.

Eric

[Freedom]

Don't worry about it. The Click through's do not necessarily update at the same time as the Page Impressions. Wait a few hours and it should balance itself out.

[EricGiguere]

Ultimately, you know your site better than anyone else. If things are abnormal, monitor the situation closely. Keep your logs. Talk to Google. Having been subjected to click fraud attacks myself, I can tell you that a high CTR is generally not something I like to see.

Eric

[jamsy]

I have genuinely had a ctr of 75% for the last 12 months and earn quite a bit from the site to which Google are obviously aware but when they look at the site they can see why!

It is a well known highly branded name that a company USED to trade under but no longer do, hence the ability to accquire the name.

When a visitor types in the site name in a browser he/she gets relative ads to what he/she are looking for so then they click!

So all in all if it is honest traffic then and you have a high CTR don't worry about it.

[desi_curry]

Thank you very very much guys. I am so happy to see that at the end of the day my CTR went down from 50% to around 30%. My main reason for not shooting the email right away was that I am not a very big player. I have around 80-100 searches and so it doesnt make much sense to trouble the google people. I mean it might be tough time for google if smaller sites people like me shoot a mail on every little fluctuation. But once I saw your response it was really a relief. THANK YOU GUYS FOR HELPING ME OUT IN SOME TENSE TIME.

[YesMom]

Desi --

If you are talking about "AdSense for Search" being used on your site, you have a very normal CTR. Mine was always high like that (before I started using a private site search)... much higher than the average CTR across my site.

However, I removed AdSense for Search because of that high CTR. I saw too many people leaving my site that way through a penny or two click when keeping them on the site was more important to me. If they leave, I'd like to have at least a nickel! Just my (ahem) 2 cents. ;-)