CTR Dropped from 11% to 1.85%

[I Will Make It]

CTR dropped from 19% to 1.85%
- And I haven't done anything..

Is the system having some sort of problems today?
Anyone else experiencing this?

Whoops.. I mean 11% - from 11% to 1.85%.
NOT 19%.. don't know where I got that number from..!?

[edited by: I_Will_Make_It at 4:54 pm (utc) on April 12, 2007]

[LifeinAsia]

Are those numebrs from today? Today's numbers are pretty meaningless until tomorrow.

[I Will Make It]

I won't say so. It depends on your pageviews.

I have about 560 pageviews so far today, and from that I should've had more than 10 clicks...

[BigDave]

It can take google hours and sometimes days to register clicks. Midday values mean nothing. Hell, anything short of a 7-day moving average means nothing. Go ahead and watch your intraday numbers, just don't fret over them.

[LifeinAsia]

560 pageviews so far today

From such a small data sample, I certainly would not fret. With a page view number that small, just a few clicks one way or the other throws CTR off wildly.

[I Will Make It]

Lifeinasia:
It sounds like you are the one who has watched my stats closely every day for almost 2 years and not myself.

But you know what? I don't think you have!

I asked one simple question, and that was if anyone else had experienced a very low CTR today, in case the system was slow.

I did not ask that question because I thought I would be rich from such a small data sample as I gave you before, and was eager to see how many $100 dollars more I would earn today as soon as the stats were updated.

I have a very, you may call it extremely, steady CTR, and it has been very predictible for almost a year now. It is so I almost are able to tell exactly how many clicks I will get each day for just taking a look in my last month calendar..

Sorry about this post, but it just pisses me of when people are telling me facts about my sites, when they don't even bother to answer my question without trying to learn me something they know nothing about.

[edited by: I_Will_Make_It at 10:52 pm (utc) on April 12, 2007]

[steve40]

I_Will_Make_It

I am sure they did not mean anything by it and were only trying to help

that is a small statistical sample but I will answer your queston for you on what I think it may be

I believe Google periodically holds a number of clicks back for detailed analysis for all sites, with sites with large traffic no perceptable notice will show but for sites with less traffic it will give the appearence of exactly what you have seen , so chill a bit and dont get too worried you may see click dump tonight or tomorrow or even the next day if your clicks are all seen as ok and at that time you may think you have won the jackpot with a cpm of double or treble normal

steve

[LifeinAsia]

I_Will_Make_It,

Sorry you got upset. My comments had nothing to do with your site. I was just pointing out the math/statistics involved.

Statistically, 500 visitors is not very significant. Just 5-6 clicks equals 1% CTR. So if you get a rogue visitor who visits 10 pages and decides to click 3 ads/page, all of a sudden your CTR shoots up 5-6%. If the same visitor goes to another site with 5,000 visitors and does the same, CTR would hardly be affected.

Who know? Maybe you have that rogue visitor who visits your site every day and clicks on a bunch of ads, giving you the high usual CTR. Maybe he's on vacation today so can't click on your ads.

[sonny]

I_Will_Make_It because I'm good enough,
I'm smart enough and doggone it, people like me.

[radix]

Here are my observations based on my sites.

For a couple of days CTR in mornings (Google time) has been about 20-30% lower than it used to be. Then it catches up, and by the end of the day it get backs to the average of recent months.

This could be due to a change in visitors (less likely) or that Google withholds clicks and monitors them more closely.

My sites get about 7,000-8,000 pageviews a day.

[mattg3]

My CTR is also falling although traffic is steady. I have now a 30% income loss. I can't see any MFA's. I guess it's that new Google Anzeigen as a Graffiic more clearly defining it as ads and the ad blindness sets in. I am really at a loss of what is happening. Smartpricing would lower the ecpm and not the CTR, imo. The ads seem to be all high quality. :\ Springtime maybe?

This trend is now 2 weeks old and on around 500.000 Adsense PIs, not just a day.

[eljefe3]

Once in a while the stats are totally messed up when they say you have so many page views, when in reality you have much less. This has happened to me on more than one occasion which really brings down the CTR.

After checking analytics and a few other metrics I have for the site, it simply shows me that the adsense report is not correct in terms of pageviews as all the other metrics are right in line with normalcy, yet adsense is askew.

[HowYesNo]

one day means nothing, 7 days hmmm alert...

[I Will Make It]

Hi guys..

First of all.. I reread my post, and LifeInAsia; I'm sorry for beeing so harsh the other day. But it was more than just adsense which went wrong that day...
Better now though :D

It's very wierd actually.. I'm experiencing the same amount of visitors, PPC and pageviews, but CTR is waaay down these days.
The ads on the page looks fine to me, and plenty of people contacts me through my "Contact Us" form..

Could it be that google has changed the layout of their ads?
- They aren't that different from before are they?

[I Will Make It]

Sonny: That's right ;)

[netchicken1]

You HAD a click through rate of 11%!
Its harder to live in hell after you have experienced heaven I imagine.

Welcome to the world of pain where all us suffering webmasters are tormented by low ctr's

[mattg3]

We have a biological site. According to analytics the top 5 main incoming keywords shifted from neutral general biological terms to more medical body related keywords. Some of these pages don't have ads on them as they might explain TOS sensitive anatomy (albeit only with graphics no pictures). So bounce rate is down returning visitors has reached a new high. The awstats show the same tendencies as analytics and adsense PI. Each visitor watches more pages and returns more often. Good long term news bad short term earning news. CTR fell again .. I also installed a third squid 3 weeks ago to speed proceedings up. The second squid didn't see an earnings drop, but the new one is not on debian and a newer version but that effect would be instant if it would be a technical problem.

So no idea really. :\

Besides when Google hates us the the long tail searches bring visitors that don't like to click, so best guess is since the incoming keywords changed dramatically the audience is less ad friendly.

[LifeinAsia]

I_Will,

S'alright. I've had several days/weeks like that myself lately!