CTR or traffic?

What is more important to you? Optimizing CTR or traffic.

[Ambjorn]

Hi,
I've been using adsense on a few very small sites for 3 years now, and I always focused on CTR. I've been cutting down adimpressions on purpose to keep CTR high as possible.

If you should choose between optimizing CTR or traffic, what would be your first priority?
Of course we all want more of both :-) What is most important to you? How does it develop for you.

CTR or traffic?

[Hobbs]

Welcome to WW,
For me personally it is in this order:

- Serving & Impressing visitors, then
- Earnings then
- Earnings but when earnings are down I dig lower:
- EPC then
- eCPM + CTR (together on the same level)

How much traffic you give to Google is a matter of schools, personal style and needs.
Can't be as simple as CTR or traffic for me.

[Swanny007]

I care more about traffic. I developed my sites for visitors, not advertisers.

If you care about CTR, then that means you care more about visitors *leaving* your site. Revenue is important but if you have a 75% bounce rate then no one is going to bookmark and come back... get my drift?

[edited by: Swanny007 at 2:58 pm (utc) on Jan. 15, 2008]

[Hobbs]

Swanny, I think by traffic, Ambjorn means controlling the served ad impressions not the number of visitors to the site.

[Swanny007]

Gotcha.

I think the game is a bit trickier now ;-) Google wants those people who click to convert for advertisers as well. So conversion is also a factor (in addition to CTR, CPM, etc.) It's more of a science.

[Ambjorn]

Swanny007,
Once I had a terrific CTR on a specific part of one website. I was kind of happy, until I realized my content system had a glitch and was serving no nothing - so people chose to leave the site through adsense. No good in the long run :-)

Focus on CTR could be kind of asking the visitors to leave the site. On the other hand: No one wants to stay on the same site all life - we want to move on in some direction. The question is only: Should people leave our site through our advice, or by just randomely repeating a surfing spasm :-)

Hobbs,
I want to control the traffic in the way, so that really only serios people are visiting. Impossibel of course. But I try. The CTR is my guideline.
Aggree with your first intent: To serve the visitors and make them feel kind of welcome :-)

[Hobbs]

Goes without saying that once you have established that the site is good enough to attract repeat visitor bookmarks and search engine love, the next step is ad optimization which is where you are now.

The tools you have to pay with are ad sizes, ad colors, number of ad blocks per page, ad type and as you say, having an ad in the first place in the page or not.

At this level, optimizing for the highest CTR is fair game and well justified. If you've tried everything else on a page and it still performs lousy to the extent your visitors are better off not seeing ads on that page, by all means go for it and leave pages ad free (I put firefox ads on those), if your only concern is CTR then give overall earnings a higher priority.

[alephh]

Increasing CTR:
- you cannot increase CTR endlessly, you found "the best" possible design after enough experiments.
- More you optimize, the harder it gets to improve... finally you'll end up doing 1000 hours of work to increase CTR 0.01% - not worth it anymore.
- If you push it too far, site starts to look spammy.
- Focusing too much on CTR may be shortsighted, if surfers leave your site all the time - is that really good?

Increasing traffic has more potential, less limits. Even if are #1 with certain keyword, there are 9285983597 (more or less related) keywords to go for ;-)

_

[Atomic]

I think that if you focus on CTR you will soon be posting that you've been smart priced and will want to know how to fix that.

[joelgreen]

traffic from relevant sources

[europeforvisitors]

Traffic and audience. (Which aren't the same thing.)

[celgins]

First priority is the right kind of traffic.

When that increases (exponentially, I hope!), all other things will fall into place (with the right amount of marketing and advertising).

[greatstart]

I'll take traffic anytime over CTR. No matter how good my CTR is, if I don't have good targeted traffic, I will suffer. Many days are like that lately. My big task for 2008 is to get that good targeted traffic. I wish myself well!

[freelistfool]

If you have enough traffic you won't have time to worry about CTR.