Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've heard most people say that "about 2%" is average, although this can be much higher or much lower under some circumstances.
my CTR is depressingly low. someone also once said that untargetted, annoying flash-y banner ads typically get around a .5% CTR.
ours is worse than this.
what I'm wondering, though, is it simply my target audience that's dooming my CTR?
Try grouping your sites into channels and analyse the results. My overall CTR is 1.5% but certain sections/channels can be as high as 6%..
my CTR is depressingly low. someone also once said that untargetted, annoying flash-y banner ads typically get around a .5% CTR.ours is worse than this.
Mine is less than half of that. Hands down the cause is the audience in my case, but not becuase they are a bad preforming group, but because they visit my site so frequently.
Somewhere around 85+% are repeat visits, with many people visiting several times per day. They know what they want, they get it, they go on about their merry way. In a case like mine, with Google's displayed ads being relatively static, and with all the repeat visits, 1% would be a miracle.
If your site's traffic is anywhere near the same as mine, you have to constatly mix things up. With the avg visitor making 20+ visits in a week, not only ads, but entire ad formats become stale.
I've received over 20,000 verified sign-ups for my best affiliate program, but if I don't change the link color, wording, layout, etc, on a regular basis, sign-ups will drop to zero in a relatively short amount of time.
So, obviously, my suggestion would be no matter what technique, format, etc performed best right now, it might require mixing things up every now and then just to keep things fresh.
But don't worry so much about numbers that others post. G'head and try their ideas, but there are so many factors involved that it's not worth comparing numbers.
Try creating channels & researching which ones do the best, try getting more/fresh/new traffic to your site, etc etc but don't spend all that much time worrying about other's numbers... use your own numbers as a starting point & try to improve.
The CTR varies wildly from topic to topic on my site, from about the depressingly low number you mentioned up to 40 times as much.
I've played with the ad format and placement, but that had only a minor impact on the ctr.
You need an audience that is task driven and seeking information related to highly competitive commercial offerings. You'll probably get a lower ctr from people that come to your site to discuss, download, use a tool, read news, be entertained etc.
The other interesting thing I noticed is that index pages and other pages with many links out get few clicks but once people get to the article and are done with my site they are more likely to click on an ad. I do get a good CTR on my homepage which is a mystery to me. I don't know if people go back to the HP after visiting other pages and then click on an ad or if they were just surfing through and click on an ad instead of exploring more of the site.
I seem to have two kinds of visitors. Regulars who come in through the HP as well as people who come too the HP through a link from another related site. Basically people who are interested in the field in general. That is about half of my visits, the rest come in through search engines. The search engine folks tend to go directly to the page that has the topic they were searching for then leave. I'm guessing more of them click on ads.
It would be interesting to hear the break down of kinds of visitors to clicking that others have experienced.
we get almost 10 times more pageviews (not adsense impressions) as we do unique visitors- maybe not quite that high, probably about 8 times.
I mean, it's to the point where I want to ask google for more accurate tracking, because I see the same numbers day after day despite have a 50% + or - shift in numbers, since it only carries out to the first 10th of a percent.
I haven't played with the placement much, but from what I've read, most people say that something like this will take a healthy CTR and improve it, not generate one if there wasn't one to begin with.
the bottom line is this:
my eCPM is about (literally) $.01.
The other interesting thing I noticed is that index pages and other pages with many links out get few clicks but once people get to the article and are done with my site they are more likely to click on an ad.
I've seen that also, with a couple of major exceptions.
Those exceptions come on a couple of resource section pages. There my CTR is much,much higher than anywhere else on my site. That despite a choice of many other related outgoing links on those resource pages. The puzzling thing about that is that the adsense ads on those pages are seldom anymore very generally targeted to the subject.
The main difference on those couple pages is that the adsense ads are right smack in the line of vision when the page loads. That may very well be the reason.
I assume that most people use some sort of include (php, ssi) to change the ad on every page
this is what we do, so it's pretty challenging to try to put different channels on different pages
it is critical to test this on each site you run
(maybe even different sections / themes within one site!)
