CTR Experiment

Removed ads for a day - interesting result

[walrus]

I know the CTR drop experienced by many lately has been thoroughly discussed,
but I noticed something that seems odd. On Wednesday morn i removed all ads from all pages.
I didn't replace them with anything, just left blank spaces on the site. I put them back thursday night.
Friday morn CTR was 30%, which it has been for 5 years. Yes, you are reading that right 30% CTR. By the next day it was back down again. Pages that have had no changes and used to get 20 - 30% now 0-1 %.

I know the first many are thinking. #*$! ? That can't be right, it is too high, must be click fraud. Thing is I actually wrote AS twice over a 3 year period asking about the CTR and if conversions for the advertisers. AS assured me conversions were good and that my AS was well optimized,it was all good.

So, i was wondering if anyone else that has experienced an odd drop in CTR (not the roller coaster drop and rise but total drop with no recovery) has noticed anything similar.

[IanCP]

Interesting, but a one off over a very brief period has to be inconclusive at best.

[walrus]

You're right, it isn't really a very good test and I guess I should correct my exaggeration.
I peaked at 30% , but was very steady well above 20.
I have to say it took a while to attain that high a CTR, it is mostly thanks to Webmasterworld that I achieved it. So, um, thanks WW.

[ken_b]

I'm curious.

Was this on a lot of pages or just a few, and were they high traffic pages?

I ask because I've seen something similar on a few low traffic, high CTR pages when I've taken the ads off for a day or two for various reasons (usually targeting), but low traffic pages are notorious for variable performance, at least in my experience.

[walrus]

Roughly 150 or so pages, 50 of them less than 100 visitors a day. Those were the worst hit of all. Flatlined actually then got worse, like reverse CTR. The higher traffic pages were still bottoming out at 10%, which I havn't had since 2005.
I was wondering also if AS landed some big accounts near the beggining of the year, draining volumes from the ad pool so a lot of it might be the same ol more publishers less high paying ads , less good ads, less relevant ads, but not as gradual a slope as usual.