Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Now instead of looking at clicks per page view I look at clicks per unique visitor to my site. From my own tracking statistics somewhere between 25-35% of unique visitors on my site are clicking ads, but since they browse through several pages before they do that, they CTR that Google reports is very low.
I have been considering adding a forum to my site but have been deterred by people here saying that forums have very low CTRs. I am worried that if I add a forum my revenue will decline. Maybe people will find the answer they are looking for in the forum and not click an ad? That sounds like a sad thing really, ads killing content, but then I had a thought.
What if all that is happening here is forum users click through 7-10 posts before getting bored and decide to move on or make a purchase decision? That would drop your CTR through the floor, but it might not have any impact at all on revenue.
It might even *rise* revenue if people think the forum is useful and so they come back a lot. You get lots of page views, but what about ads clicked per unique visitor?
CTR is a post click measurement, the value of the click is not determined by CTR, it is merly represented for reporting purposes.
Googles CTR is not very accurate. Google considers a pageview actually a ad view.
Google doesn't actually report page views; it reports "impressions." An impression is when an "ad unit" is displayed in a user's browser. So an impression might refer to two, four, or more ads, depending on whether the publisher is using banners, leaderboards, or the various sizes of rectangles and skyscrapers.
In any case, CTR is a number of interest to advertisers, not publishers. For the publisher, the only numbers that really matter are:
Effective CPM (a.k.a. revenue per 1,000 impressions), which helps the publisher determine how AdSense is performing in comparison to other sources of revenue.
Total earnings, which helps the publisher determine whether he can pay the rent and groceries. :-)
As for whether the original poster should add a forum, I'd say "No, if you're doing it only to boost AdSense revenues." He'd probably be better off investing his time in new content pages.
Here is what costs me: Getting that visitor onto my site in the first place. That cost me investment in SEO, it cost me investment in content, it cost me investment in link building, and it cost me investment in PPC. That's real money.
Who cares how many pages they look at once they are on my site? All I care is that, eventually, they click something that generates revenue, but I don't care if they click it after 1 page view or after 10, so long as they do.
So CTR, CPM, and anything else that is based on "impressions" or "page views" is not something a publisher should care about.
What I care about is whether my investment in getting someone onto my site pays off. What I care about is clicks per unique visitor.
CPM is BS too. Who cares about that?
People who publish for a living, that's who. (Ask any media company.)
Effective CPM or revenue per 1,000 impressions is how you compare revenue sources when deciding how to allocate the advertising portion of your screen "real estate." It's the one metric that's constant whether you're talking about AdSense ads, banner-ad networks, affiliate commissions, or direct ad sales.
Namely it's not a measure of how many times the page is loaded, and how many of those page loads generates a click. It measures ad block loads and clicks.
The FAQ page on my site is one of the most loaded pages, and generates the top revenue of all the pages (apart from the main index) that I have ads on. But it has the poorest CTR on the site. It never did have a fantastic CTR whatever I did to the page, but has always had a good return. Currently it has two ad blocks. If I removed one of them the page CTR would increase, and that would affect the sites overall CTR. However, I would have a decrease in income!
It is a bizarre phenomena, but I have seen it happen on my site.
I wouldn't add a forum just for adsense revenue - the effort that will go into building a viable forum will almost certainly outweigh the incremental revenue. If a forum would complement the site, or if you already have the beginnings of a community, though, it might serve to build site stickiness and repeat visits in the long run. In addition, if you build significant forum content, it will bring in some additional search traffic.
I'd look at the forum option as a long-term strategy.
About that 2 adblocks == less revenue thing. I have multiple ad blocks on my page, because my pages tend to be long. Is a good rule of thumb to have no more than one ad block visible at a time? Right now users won't see the bottom adblock on my site unless they actually scroll down.
The idea is valid, but it's wrong to use page views. You should use web sessions. How many clicks per thousand web sessions is a much better indicator of how valuable the space on your site is.
Basing CPM on page views instead of web sessions seems to me something like trying to count how many times someone looked at a newspaper before they actually read an ad. Do you care? All you care in the end is that the bought the newspaper and looked at the ad.
Same with the web. You don't really care if they looked at 5 or 10 pages before they clicked the ad. You care that they came to your site and that eventually they clicked the ad.
Whether they looked at 1 page or 10 pages has absolutely no impact on your bottom line as a publisher.
[netiq.com...]
Effective CPM is an industry standard for a good reason: It's the most accurate and consistent way of measuring performance for ads, affiliate sales, etc. in print, broadcast, or Web media. Of course, if you own your Web site, you don't have to go along with the publishing and advertising industries: You can use any method you like.
Is this right? One actual page view of a page that contains an AdSense rectangle with 4 Adsense ads equals 4 page views on my Adsense stats page?
One ad box with four ads counts as one page view. Three ad boxes count as three pageviews each time the page is loaded.
