Adsense on simplified Chinese pages

Are my poor results typical?

[HarryM]

I have now been running Adsense on simplified Chinese pages for over a month. Results are abysmal - much, much, worse than my English language channels. CTR is less than a single digit, CPM is less than 50c, and the average click is only a few cents. (I hope that's not against the TOS!)

I have tried different ad colors but no noticeable difference, so next step is to try repositioning. But as the results are so low should I expect much improvement? Should I even bother?

Question is: is this a typical result? Or is it just me?

(The site is a travel-related .com, hosted in the UK.)

[Jenstar]

Have you checked to see if it is running an unusually high number of PSAs? And if the AdSense Preview Tool is showing for inventory when you have it geo-targeted to Chinese speaking countries?

[HarryM]

Hopefully the following isn't against the TOS, but here goes.

I have only ever seen one PSA.

If I check geo-targetting with the preview tool set on Extended Ad List, for pages relating to China I typically get between 4 and 7 ads for Singapore, UK, and US, with 1 or 2 more for Hong Kong. The ads are all in Chinese and are typically for hotel and travel agencies.

Some pages pages relating to Hong Kong show 11 or 12 ads, but for the majority the numbers are the same as for China. I have recently added a 468x60 block to the Hong Kong pages as well as the previous 600x120, and often ads only display in the 468x60 block (it loads first).

For the Hong Kong pages the ads are mainly in Chinese, with some in English, and a few in Japanese. Mostly travel and hotel ads, but also for some mysterious reason, flower shops.

Of course there is no Taiwan or Mainland China setting on the preview tool, so I can't be sure what is shown there.

If these pages were in English I would run them through a keyword checker, but I haven't found one that can handle Chinese. That might help target better ads, but I'm not sure it would help if a low CTR is typical of the region.

[dongjp]

I guess one of the reason is: the font for the text in Adsense is good for english, but it is too small for Chinese characters to be clearly displayed.

[HarryM]

That may be part of the answer. The font size is far too small in a 468x60 banner, but it looks OK in a skyscraper format, which is what I have on most pages. But in both cases the heading line in bold is not very clear.

It would certainly look bad in traditional characters, should this option ever become available.

[nomatter]

I have similar situation as yours. I applied the Chinese adsense soon after G has Chinese version.

But the result is not what I thought. I think it may relate to the adwords bids. I have run for a month now, only one day I got high CPM.

Anyway, I'll try for several months more. One month may not give you proper statistics.