Is Digg useless for AdSense?

Stats too low to be true

[sunset_blvd]

I have a website/blog that today got dugg beyond my expectations. At first I was happy and couldn't wait for the AS stats to refresh. But when they did, I found out that the only thing I got from Digg was a waste of bandwidth. My CTR is 0.05% (!) and the impressions are over 30000 in the last three hours.
My question is: am I doing something wrong or is this normal with Digg (i.e. Digg users are not click-happy etc)?

[FourDegreez]

I haven't been dugg, but I've been farked and I imagine the result is similar. Same story with Slashdot and other sites that can send a huge amount of traffic your way. The problem is that the traffic is not so useful, not nearly as useful as from a search engine. People are clicking your link on a whim, and it's usually someone who is fairly internet savvy. They check out your page and then they leave, not too concerned with your page's topic or the ads displayed therein.

That said, I've found that the traffic increase does translate into an increase in earnings. Just not as much as you'd predict based on your normal traffic. I've definitely not seen a CTR that low! Maybe you need to adjust your placement and blending?

[loganz]

His CTR is low because him impressions have skyrocketed from digg. But its true, (most) people coming from digg or other sites are more tech saavy and dont click the ads.

[jathos]

My site has been dugg several times, and I can confirm that you don't get much, if any, revenue from the digg crowd. I thik a lot of the tech-savvy digg viewers have ad-blockers installed anyway, and the others just ignore ads.

However, being dugg does wonders for your site long-term. I still get lots of traffic to my site to pages that were dugg last year - the simple mention helps those pages a lot in search rankings. The referrer is often digg.com itself.

[BigDave]

The advantage to getting links from those monster traffic sites is the effect on your future earnings. It is especially good if the page that is slashdotted or whatever, is that you will almost certainly get more incoming links than just the on on that site.

And if the blogosphere latches on to it, you can really rack up the links.

[Jane_Doe]

In my experience, traffic from places like that can actually lower your income sometimes because of smart pricing, since it is often poorer converting than the traffic from search engine queries. I have one site that is really popular for some reason in the blogosphere and with the social book marking crowd, but the CPM is half that of a somewhat similar site that has more search engine based traffic.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 10:34 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2006]

[enthrall]

I guess these "bursts" of traffic are only useful if you are running pay per view ads.

[swa66]

As far as I know it's mostly useful in the long term to get more PR and more referral traffic. The peak itself is less useful advertising wise, but look at the CPC and clicks, not so much at CTR and eCPM which will drop, yet the short term should not influence your clicks and the earnings for those clicks directly.

See it as an investment in the future.

[sunset_blvd]

Thanks a lot for your answers. You really calmed me down a bit.
Also, FWIW, after a little tweaking, my CTR climbed almost 2.5x times, reaching the stunning value of 0.12%.
I'll keep you posted in the long term.
Thank you again.

[swa66]

Oh a trick many do that often get hit by /. and others like it: make sure you have a layout that's lean, fast and small and offer that when your load goes through the roof, it'll save you on bandwidth and other resources.

[JoeS]

The Digg crowd is probably not going to click on your ads unless by accident.

[ndaru]

I get dugg once. Although the impression was shooting to almost 800%, the number of click only got an 25% increase. Which translated to a very very low CTR.

At the end of day, the earning did increase. And since then I notice that I get several more inbound links which increases my traffic level.

Mentioned in digg.com is always nice.

[netchicken1]

Diggers never click links. I know I certianly don't, nor have recieved much when my site has been dugg.

Nor to diggers join boards, post comments, return spontaniously in the future, or read much old stuff.

The only benefit to submitting sites to Digg, is to get the backlink to your site.

[fredw]

I was farked once and it was one of my biggest weeks ever revenue-wise. So, YMMV.