Ok, so I have read countless threads on here with people saying "my CTR is xx%, is this too high?" and the responses are always the same. Some say it can be 20% and that's fine, others say it should be between 1 and 10%, one particular lady says it's impossible to have over 8% legitimately... so my question is, is this based on your average for the month? or like, any day that ends above the "limit" then I will be looked at by the Adsense team? I ask because some days my CTR is a regular like 3-5%, but like today, it's 16% and for a good bit of the day it was 50%. However, my average for the month of August is like less than 2% (all the 0 click days are killing me). Feedback is appreciated. Also, I know I could have easily searched this in the search and found plenty of answers but I'm new here and need to get posts anyway.
I'm new also and curious about this. I will say though that my CTR is also way high today. I only launched my site 2 weeks ago and my average CTR has been around 4-5% but I would love to see it stay where it is now
Maybe I should also add that my site has only been live since August 4, and I'm literally talking like... 5-10 visitors a day on average... with around 20-something as my highest so far.
I sometime get 100% CTR on a few of my sites. If the site gets extremely low visitors (<10) than there may be a chance that you get 100% CTR. But for a large traffic site, 50% CTR is suspicious if you get for a week or so
My average click through on one of my sites is 50%, and I've had that CTR for the last 2 months. That's with 1K to 2K traffic a day. My advice? Don't lose any sleep over it. P.S. By the way, at $.04 a click, it isn't a big earner for me.
Does the amount you get paid matter also or you just mentioned that so everyone doesn't think you're like... a millionaire or something? My average CPC is like $1.75, so I hope that isn't taken into consideration as well.
Just giving you the CPC info because that's what we do here...we take the time to share ideas and experiences to help us all become webmasters.
you don't have cpc, you have epc(earnings per click). cpc is cost per click, and it's usually associated with advertisers, not publishers. if your ctr is too high, the epc will drop radically to make up for it... google calls it "smart pricing". so you don't want to make junk pages that prop up the ctr artifically... you want to design pages that convert honestly for the advertiser; pages that will drive quality traffic. remember that if the adwords advertiser sees that your pages are crap that doesn't convert, he can ban your site from receiving any of his ads.
One of my blogs has around 28% CTR and its all legit. Google have payed me for every click. This happens day in day out.
In my opinion CTR of 1% is also fine and CTR or 30% is also fine as far as it is consistent and not breaking any TOS. Only thing is that the standard variation of your CTR on some specific days shouldn't be much far away from your mean (average) CTR. It shouldn't be that one day its 0.05% for 10K page views and next day its 10% for same number of page views (on same/similar ads). Then it becomes suspicious and gets into Google filters.
"one particular lady says it's impossible to have over 8% legitimately" This is 100% in correct. You can have a legit CTR that is greater than 8%. CTR depends on ad placements and Niche. If clicks are genuine then any CTR is OK.
CTR is not the determining factor for smart pricing. It's conversion of clicks that come from your site (something Google obviously doesn't let us in on). The concept of smart pricing is (hopefully) to drive out of business those publishers whose idea of an adsense business is to drive a boatload of traffic (by whatever spammy means necessary) to a garbage MFA site and hope that the people are so disgusted with your site that they use the ads as an escape hatch. There are still a lot of people who advocate something similar. I have several sites that average over %15 day in and day out and my average click on some of those sites is a couple of bucks. If I understand the history correctly, Joel Comm was the one who started the 10%=RED FLAG!!! rumor. Not being privy to the inner workings of Google, I couldn't tell you if this rumor is true or not, but owning several sites that consistently get over 10% CTR (with honest traffic and presumably honest clicks), I can tell you it doesn't automatically get you banned, smartpriced, deindexed, or anything bad like that.
you don't know what data is used to determine smart pricing, and neither does anyone else. the fact remains that if your ctr is too high for the conversions that the advertiser gets, your site, and maybe your entire account, WILL be penalized... google has told us that, clicks that don't convert will cost you as a publisher. 15% ctr average is nothing... i have channels that average nearly 30%, with several years worth of data collected on what happens to the epc. we could hijack this thread into an essay on how scammers force people to click on ads, but there is no sense in making a big problem even worse. the main thing to remember here is to design your site for epc, NOT ctr.
This is what I was saying - it's conversion% of your clicks that is Google's stated main criterion for smart pricing. In other words, if your CTR was 600% and the expected 'legit' # of those clicks converted, then you wouldn't be smart priced. I also totally agree with you on building your sites for epc rather than ctr. On the other hand, your traffic should be targeted for ctr because getting people who are interested in the topic (and therefore the ads) is what the entire adsense model is built on. The more targeted your traffic is, the better your CTR (depending on niche) and since they are legit clicks, then a certain percentage should convert, keeping you from being smart priced.
i think that we are saying the exact same thing, lol the high-ctr channels i've had up for years have seen decreasing epc, lower than what my overall account average is... but not by much, 20% at the most? it's only on a few pages... google must have a mechanism for evaluating each page for epc.
Obviously the average value is taken into consideration. but whatever is it, here more important is what value off money due to get and not the other variables.