Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My click through rate seems kind of high from what I expected it's hovering around 5%, is this usual? I've heard a few people get kicked off the scheme because of fraudulent clicks, might google see the high click through rate as fraudulent?
- Martin
What may be happening is the impressions are running slow and the clicks are up to date. Thus giving an inaccurate CTR.
If I ever get something like you are experiencing I just write to the support telling them that I am a good boy. They usually pat me on the head and tell me not to worry.
Mind that just might them just being nice. Adsense publishers can become quite paranoid. But hey paranoid people get followed too......
I wouldn't be concerned unless your CTR has changed significantly without you changing the presentation or significant change to the advertisers.
But it really depends 5% of a 100 page views or 5% of a 1000000 is a big statistical difference.
If you talked about total page view volume someone can give you a better idea on how your site is doing.
Also, sites running AdSense sometimes have a higher CTR at the beginning when people are clicking the ads out of curiousity wondering "what are these?"
In normal advertising a 5% would be REALLY high for a banner, average I believe is around 0.2%. A 5% CTR would set off my alarms if I ran an ad company for sure.
CTRs on banner ads have fallen over the last several years and studies I've seen show averages in the 0.2%-0.5% range. However, text ads tend to perform better than traditional banner ads and targeted ads tend to perform better than untargeted or poorly targeted ads.
Like I said earlier in this thread, CTRs depend on many factors. CTRs in the 5% to 10% range are actually reasonable, even without resorting to strategies such as having no links to leave the page other than the ads (something I don't condone or recommend). If users visit your page because it provides information about Widget X or Service Y and they are in buy mode and the ads displayed are about buying Widget X and Service Y you can expect much higher CTRs than if your site is about Widgets in general, users are interested only in Widget X and are looking for information, not to buy Widgets and the ads displayed are about purchasing Widget Y and Widget Z (or worse are about Gidgets instead of Widgets).
It's no different than a sporting event on TV showing ads for feminine hygiene products or advertising that's confusing and ineffective.
There are people with daily average CTRs ranging anywhere from 0.5% to 15% without raising any alarms
Absolutely. One site I know (and do some work on) often gets above 15% and no problems with Google over the last 2-3 months.
I'm with richmondsteve on not endorsing "zero content" pages but for some sectors double digit CTR is definitely possible, happens, and is accepted as OK by Google. What their systems don't like is a sudden drop or jump in CTR. If you have reason to believe there will be a sharp change in CTR email Google and they will take your email into account when looking at the "flags".
When I compare Last wed to this wed, I am seeing almost constant CTR across days.
So as Jenstar said it's the variation that is important rather that CTR being 5% or 15% or 1%.
When I check the graphs ,my adsense stats are amazingly constant,I was left wondering , people behave so systematically week after week.
Yeah, it seems as if the CTR has changed now, to around 3%.
I think google hasn't started publishing the adds on all the pages consistently yet, because the difference in my impressions on google adsense reports are MUCH lower, than on my statistics system, i'm talking like 1/4 of my REAL page views :-S!
- Martin
I've been using it for the past week
I'm guessing the CFR is because its new to my site, and that users will be unfamiliar with the ads, and maybe click em more?
This includes travel, big purchases, changing a provider or buying a good or service for something specific.
going by your username, I would say that an XML site would pull in some of those hosting and related ads, which are known to be good deals for the publisher.
i changed something on my site which i thought would help and, indeed, I went overnight to a ctr of 2.5x%
wrote to google immediately and got a "don't worry" response. I think any major change like that should be noted to G.
