Negative CTR trend?

CTR trends with AdSense

[loudspeaker]

I want to ask a general opinion on CTR trends.

On one of my sites I am seeing a steadily declining CTR over the past few months:

CTR

NOV 1.8%
DEC 1.6%
JAN 1.4%
FEB 1.1%
MAR 1.0%
APR 0.9%
MAY 0.8%
JUN 0.8%

It's not very hard to guess where that curve is headed. So far, 0.75% in July. The impressions have grown more than 2-fold in this period, but because of the lower CTR, the actual income barely increased at all.

I just want to know if that happens only to my site and is somehow my fault (not much has changed in terms of layout - the site has just grown and become much better in my opinion, but the ads are still shown the same way) or other webmasters are seeing the same thing.

And if the latter, what are your theories? (e.g. AdSense ad fatigue, inferior ad selection by Google, etc etc)...

Any comments or suggestions appreciated...

[martinibuster]

Are the number of clicks holding steady?

[loudspeaker]

There's some small growth in the absolute numbers of clicks, but the traffic (sorry, impressions) have increased A LOT more and because of the lower CTR the end result is that I have almost the same payoff running a site with 2.5 times the traffic I had last year...

[martinibuster]

Ok, I thought so.

Could be the quality of the traffic. For example, I have a section of a website that features a freebie download. It's my most popular section. However, because people are there for downloading a specific item that is offered for free on that page, they're generally not interested in the items offered in the ads.

Is it possible that the motivation behind the some of your increased traffic is not conducive to clicks because they're freebie seekers, or info seekers, or are otherwise finding 100% fulfillment in what you're offering right there on the page?

[Alex_Miles]

Every time that happens to me its Googles way of saying my competitve url filter is hungry.

[loudspeaker]

because they're freebie seekers, or info seekers, or are otherwise finding 100% fulfillment in what you're offering right there on the page?

I think you might be onto something.... But this has always been the case and I am just bothered with the trend in CTR, not the low absolute numbers.