Aloha, For the last three days my CTR has been reduced to one half for one of my sites I blacklisted a few low paying ads around September 31/August 1, but there is still more than enough ads available to fill all the spots on my site. Have anyone experience the same after blacklisting ads? I'll probably try to remove the blacklisting for a day or two to see if CTR goes up again. I would say the ads are way more interesting now, so I surely don't understand why CTR is reduced to one half (before the ads where like 'We have found the 8 best sites about XX', 'Here are the 7 best sites about XX').
But shouldn't that lower the number of pageviews and not the CTR? My pageviews haven't changed at all (6-7K/day), it's only my CTR that has crashed. When does this annoying holiday end?
Although I haven't noticed this effect myself, I'm sure my site topics are different than yours. It may be that advertisers for your topic have suspended or reduced advertising during the holiday (U.S.) period, particularly if it's a business-related topic.
If you blacklist ads based solely on their payout per click, you are shooting yourself in the foot. First, ads that perform better seem t be selected for placement by Goolge more often, provided they are within their own budget. Second, if you use the competitive ad filter to eliminate a "low paying" ad, chances are it will be replaced by something lower paying or poorly worded. If you are getting badly constructed ads, that would drop your CTR. Remember that everyone wins if ads get clicked, and Google would not place ads on your site if they weren't the best payout option - for everyone - available. Now I am not suggesting Google's selection of relevant ads is always perfect, but blacklisting an ad for what it is paying doesn't make sense to me.
In other words, did we encourage to filter some of the low paying of competitor? For me, i didn't filter and ad. and did the suggust to do so?
Just remove your filter and see what differnce it makes! Compare your total earnings per day, not the CTR!
It happened to me too after I blacklisted two domains, ofcourse I removed them from the blacklist and now everything is fine again