Does Higher CTR get you higher paying ads?

[rjhere]

Hi everyone.. I'm a LONG time lurker and first time poster.

I have two sites where I changed the large widthwise banner into a more centralized large rectangle.

I did this for Site A on Monday and CTR's went through the roof. On Wednsday, my CPC also went through the roof (higher costs per click).

On Tuesday, I did the same for Site B. Wednesday CTR's went through roof as with site A. And today CPC tripled just as it did on Site A.

My question, does google reward higher CTR's with the higher paying advertisers? Has anyone here had this experience?

Perhaps it just one of those random fluxuations that coincidently happened to both sites after making these changes.

Thanks..

[rjhere]

I asked this questions a week or so ago and have come to the conclusion that CTR does affect CPC. I posted a site for sale on another forum so I got a lot of visits that were geared toward evaluating the value of my site. My CTR plummented and with that my CPC. A few days later after this traffic has stopped my CTR's once again went through the roof as did CPC. My other site which I noticed this phenominom on had same CTR and CPC.

Again this could be another coincidence but do think Google serves up the more lucritive ads for a higher CTR. Does anyone else have inputs? I am just curious to see if this is a valid theory or just a coincidence.

[europeforvisitors]

Does Higher CTR get you higher paying ads?

Google isn't saying, and attempts to find out through experimentation are doomed by the presence of so many other variables.

Common sense would suggest that higher conversion rates will get you higher-paying ads. For that reason, attempts to jack up CTR artificially may be counterproductive.

[MikeNoLastName]

I've pondered this for months and have been closely tracking it for us as we started below 2% CTR and climbed, but like EFV says there COULD be a lot of other variables affecting my results.
My theory:
PPC increases from 0% CTR up to around 5.5%-6.0% CTR (total account daily - not per page).
Above 5.5%-6.0% it starts to decrease quickly again as CTR goes higher!
This almost makes sense if you look at it from the point of view that G is probably looking at some sort of system-wide average or ideal stats and then penalizing those who are outside of the average figuring they must be doing something wrong or doing something to try to scam the system so their clicks are not as valuable.
A lot depends on HOW you are optimizing. A similar effect could also be seen if you 'optimize' by adding larger ad blocks resulting in more ads, which may get clicked more (higher CTR), but the PPC is lower for the added 'less optimal' ones.

[europeforvisitors]

This almost makes sense if you look at it from the point of view that G is probably looking at some sort of system-wide average or ideal stats and then penalizing those who are outside of the average figuring they must be doing something wrong or doing something to try to scam the system so their clicks are not as valuable.

Yes, that does make a lot of sense. They probably use the "way outside the norm" approach for other things, too, such as fraud detection and flagging accounts for manual review.