Forum Moderators: martinibuster
never mind :)
[edited by: Mikey85 at 11:17 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2005]
Imagine a famouse actress commits suicide
10 thousands of people search for her in Google
and find a picture from her.
In this case could the CTR be unusual low,
because the visitors are not in the right mood.
From my own analysis of my own tracking data from my own web logs that I created myself over the last few weeks:
-- 10% CTR per page view
-- 28% CTR per web session
-- 46% of my traffic is organic, 54% from PPC
-- CTR/session for PPC is 29%
-- CTR/session for organic SERPs is only 23%
-- 10% of web sessions viewed over 5 pages
My site is content-oriented and basically I just want to build traffic to it, I don't sell anything, so there are no conversions. I pay for AdWords with money I earn from AdSense, and view that as a way of growing organic traffic over time (I hope people like my site and bookmark it).
I think the PPC traffic is more likely to click through an ad because they are people who are obviously willing to click on ads. I have three ad blocks on my site: 1. left colum, 2. near top of page, 3. footer. I cannot tell you what the CTR for each of these is because I use Google to track that information. I also can't tell you whether any of the above is even close to what Google reports in their stats; but I do trust that my stats are accurate (almost all users used IE, which I can track correctly).
Moderators please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe that my reporting this violates the TOS in any way.
HOWEVER, my overall traffic to my site varies like mad. One day I might have 3x the visitors of another day, and EPC is *very* erratic, again swinging by 2x to 3x a day, so overall even though I have stable CTR's my earnings one day after another bounce around like mad.
how is that possible?
I can't get it higher then 2%! (with 3 ad blocks)
Try borderless ads, changing the colours so that they are the same as on your site, using three ad units etc etc all these should affect your CTR.
I've actually seen posts by WW members who have eliminated lower-CTR pages to boost their overall clickthrough rates ([says a perplexed EFV, shaking his head in wonder].
You got 9%? That's very high...how is that possible?
I can't get it higher then 2%! (with 3 ad blocks)
Do not compare CTR.... they are completely meaningingless when comparing site-to-site.
Do not compare CTR.... they are completely meaningingless when comparing site-to-site.
Precisely. A site with 10 pages on Harry Potter or Microsoft widgets might have a dozen times the CTR as a site with 1,000 pages about all kinds of popular and obscure widgets, but the latter could easily score higher revenues overall.
On my own 4,200-page site, I could easily multiply my CTR tenfold by eliminating all but the most popular topics. But in the process, I'd be throwing away most of my AdSense income.
I can't get it higher then 2%! (with 3 ad blocks)
There's your problem right there. With 3 ad blocks if you had a 100% CTR it would only show 33% because for each page view you get 3 ad impressions. Cut out 2 of the ad blocks and your CTR will rise if your 1 remaining block is featured in plain view.
This is the true eCPM and the best measure of preformance. Likewise the true CTR is clicks divided by the page impressions and multiply by 100.
The Google eCPM is misleading - it is ad block impressions, not page impressions. If you have 3 ad blocks at 2%, you should be getting a true CTR closer to 6%.
I don't know how much I can say here without getting into trouble, but I have found it very difficult to relate "page views" to AdSense's statistics. I suspect that frequently what happens is a user clicks on the first ad block before the third ad block has even loaded, and so that page counted as two impressions rather than three.
At any rate CTR per page-view is the interesting number, and since AdSense doesn't even allow you to estimate that (dividing doesn't work) I strongly recommend you start tracking your clicks yourself.
It doesn't matter that my site has a 10% CTR really.
It *does* matter that I know organic SERPs have a lower CTR than users I attract through PPC advertising. It *does* matter that I know which of my PPC ads produce users who click on ads and which don't. It *does* matter that I know which of my referrers send me traffic that clicks on ads and which sends me traffic that wastes my time. It *does* matter that I know which pages on my site attract the most clicks.
The real value in tracking your own statistics is that you can relate ad clicks to sources of traffic, and work on building the most valuable traffic.
Otherwise you think any visitor on your site is worth the same as any other--and they're not, some sources send you visitors that are worth MUCH more than others.
If you have visitors that look at 10 more more pages of your site, for instance, that really skews things. A truer picture would be to find out the percentage of visitors who eventually click an ad. If they go to 20 or 30 pages on a site before clicking on an ad, that's great. It's means we're offering a quality site, and we'll also have people coming back.
I moved one of my banners from right skyscraper to centre block, and both the ctr and income trebled. I recently added an additional ad block bottom of the page, and though my ctr decreased the income for the page increased marginally.
Because I don't have that many banners, each banner is a channel. I look at how each channel is performing, and if it isn't worthwhile having a particular ad block, then I will remove it.
