1 click per 1000 pages viewed

good or bad?

[meleva]

I just put adsense on my site and i got roughly 1 click per 1000 pages viewed. My site does not have very much traffic at the moment, so I wonder if this ratio is an average one.

[UserFriendly]

I'm guessing that most people who post to this forum could make that percentage several times higher.

Of course, we're forbidden from detailing exact numbers. But, yeah, that is low.

Have you taken a look at the help section in AdSense? It has useful tips for optimizing the placement and colours of your ad-blocks.

However, if you're running a forum, they seem to have famously low CTR.

[edited by: UserFriendly at 3:59 pm (utc) on Sep. 13, 2006]

[net_rambler]

it is too low...
probably you have too many ads on page or they placed outside of heat maps check google adsense faq for them

[andrewshim]

does seem very low, but my first site 3 years ago was also dismally low too. I finally realized there wasn't a lot of ads in my category so what I got was non-targetted. In any case, visitors to my first site came looking for my content (eCards) and never clicked on any ad.

Now things are remarkably different. I'm in a very popular niche with my second site and doing fairly well in the serps.

So what I'm saying is maybe your niche is just not a popular one with a very low inventory of ads.

[clickme]

Very low. Maybe try switching up the format of the adds?

[meleva]

Thanks for the replies.
I read a lot of thread in the forum and I see clearly why my website won't work very well with adsense.
It is a geotargeted joke site, a la Overheard in NY (but not in English and not about NY)
People come to have a laugh, they might see ads related to the city but are not really interested in buying anything nor in clicking on hotels, flights and so on.
The funny things is: I don't get many clicks, but when I get them they are usually over 0,50. My guess is that because the city in question is a popular destination I get travel ads where keywords are high.

[level80]

Your clickthrough rate at 0.1% is pretty low. For comparison my CTR is in the high x.xx% range. If you don't know already you're allowed three ad blocks per a page. My current format is a 336x280 block at the start of the content and two 160x600s vertically stacked in the right sidebar. I'm sure with a similar format you could massively improve your CTR. Remember also you are allowed an Adlinks block and the various referral buttons on the same stage too. Experiment with colours/borders and placement and you'll soon find a way to get to a single digit CTR at least. I would've thought that the targetting should improve over time too as Google figures out which ads work on which pages. You can also use the competitive ad filter to remove ads that are irrelevant to your site's content.

[trannack]

Try putting adsense start stop tags around joke specific blog on your page - maybe you will then get links to other joke sites.