Has the ad format on the ad units changed a bit. In other words instead of having the description of the ads below the clickable title, the description starts on the same line as the clickable title. Also if this is a recent change, then did it change around the start of May. The reasons I'm saying this is because from 2nd May my CTR on all my sites has halfed, it's total nonsense, nothing on the sites have changed at all. I'm not on about the site in my signature as I wrk for that site, but have my own individual personal sites to. Has anyone else noticed this halving of CTR? Quality of traffic is still the same, add placements have not moved or any info on the pages have not changed. This halving of CTR is so big in that I'm going to have the lowest CTR on all the sites since I joined Adsense during 2003, that's over 7 yrs ago. The CTR is roughly the same each day, it's not bouncing back at all on a day here and there, everyday is giving roughly half of the CTR. Thanks for you help.
I suppose the relevant ads are not getting displayed that's the reason you are experiencing a low CTR (when all the other parameters remain the same).
I have experienced the similar without any change made, even the Ad format. I do think the season and emotional of visitors, depends on your niche, has something to do with their search activity, reading and clicking activity. I found the highest season for me is around October - February, otherwise is just a normal rate.
Well half way through the day and so far my CTR is 4 times less than it's avg over a 3+ years period. Today is totally awful and this is on a high paying niche. Something doesn't seem right here with the amount of traffic I send to the ads pages each day. Nothings changed, quality of traffic and content is the same, it's the only CTR that's decreased with today being the worst by far so far. Oh well, hopefully it's just a glitch and it will improve soon. Yesturday was a bit better, but not as good as the wknd normally use to be.
Adsense often make changes to a small set of Publishers' site before launching them to the others.. Perhaps you are seeing the experimental changes.
The ads just look exactly the same as the ads on Digitalpoint. The clickable title is on the same line as where the description starts. I guess that's been around for a while now, the description use to start below the clickable title a while back.
At the beginning of may I start doing some experiments on my blocks, in couple days I changed everthing back from what I start and I was very surprised that coming back to old formats didnt bring CTR back to what I had, but I find out some where on google blogs where says that google could take some time to get all those changes make to work properly again, in that case could be that some of the pages are not categorized properly or could be something else. Just sharing my ideas what could be those changes in CTR...
One very important thing about any kind of business, that's to never put all your eggs into one basket meaning adsense is not my online only source of revenue from my sites. Glad it's not as although I've had a 3 or so run of not so bad money from it, not brilliant, but all helps to pay the bills. In anycase first it was the CTR halving which I would say is now about 33% lower than it's avg as my CTR has nudged up over the wknd and into this wk, my pay per click amount has decided to practically half since yesturday. So now facing 33% less CTR plus a 50% drop in earnings per click. Good business practice is to have many eggs in many different baskets which I have. As I said b4, this could just be a temp blip and hopefully it will get back to avg sooner or later, but if not I do have money coming from other places and other websites of mine.
I find out that its not really CTR problem because of some technical issues, after recent updates of ads blocks most of my ads becomes not relevant to the page content, could be some tests on google side or could be something else...
Thanks for your replies. Yesterdays earnings per click picked up very late in the day including CTR. Seems yesterday was only a small bit below a 3 yr avg and today earnings is so far pretty good with CTR a bit above avg. So in other words, seems like things are back to normal with Adsense for me now. Great stuff and hope it stays that way.