Google Adsense CTR?

I've heard that google was great to advertise on your website and that some people make quite a bit of money. Well, I'm wondering how much money do you usually make and how many clicks compared to how many impressions you recieve? Has it worked for you? Any tips on maximizing how many clicks you recieve? And how much do you normally make per click?

 

Its actually against the TOS to discuss it, but the click value varies on the content.

 

Most sites should average 1 to 5% CTR, mine doesn't even reach that, but I can get the impressions up quite quickly so it equals out.

 

my ctr varies everyday. i am averaging 1%-3%.

 

It all depends on what kind of content your site has. If it's like a product review / informational site, CTR will probably be high. If your site is about entertainment or news, I'd expect it to be lower.

 

Correct. It also depends very much on where you place your ads. Certain places can pull 10 times more clicks than another. You have to test different places for your ads.

 

It also depends where you traffic is coming from. I find if my traffic comes from a search engine that it brings a higher CTR than if I get a big one off link up off a big site. I also find that sites with a loyal readership that keep coming back have lower CTR.

there are many factors - to say a particularly figure is 'average' is not that accurate....

 

Optimizing your CTR is a very sensitive game. Sometimes just the simple addition of a border around your ads will drop or increase your CTR by a 1/2 a point or more. If you are just starting out with Adsense (which I would recommend trying BTW), you should definitely experiment with some various placements and colors schemes. Use Channels to track the different locations of your ads so you can go back later and compare. Once you find a good combination of location and color scheme for your ad, stick with it and start working on getting more traffic.

 

Thanks for the advice, I'll try it out. My dad will have to register it though. Since I'm not 18.

 

I read people saying they're CTR is at around 5%. I'm getting an average 7.8%, should I be concerned that Google might think I'm resorting to fraudulent clicks?

 

Super_Kid, no.

I am not too worried about my CTR, I hear some people remove certain pages and remove multiple-ads from certain pages to increase their CTR -- stupid if you ask me, you're not getting paid based on your CTR, if losing pages/ads lowers your impressions, doesn't change clicks, but increases your CTR, why do it? Just asking for problems/loss of clicks if you ask me.

 

Thanks.

Judging by the average CTR around these messageboards I was starting to think I'd would actually have to ask my readers to STOP clicking on the ads, to avoid problems.

 

I was worried about that too super_kid. Actually I'm in the process of building a site and plan on using adsense. I have an idea of how successful my site "could be", but in the back of my mind I'm wondering if google could kick me out if I got a 30% or 40% CTR legitimately.

 

You might as well try, man. It'll either work or not, but hey, you're not losing anything

 

lol, take the links and put them in banners.

 

Hi all,

I have 5 sites with AdSense ads running. They vary from a low of about 0.5% to about 20% CTR. All of them get their traffic from link partners, directories, and SE's. Interestingly, a trend I've noticed is that the more competition a page has, the higher my CTR. For example, I have a site that is in a niche that has only a few thousand competitors, and I routinely get the lowest CTR on those pages. Usually <2%.

The site with the most competitors (9 million or so) routinely sees CTR in the 15%-25% range.

My conclusion is that more competition means a bigger range of AdWord ads Google has at its disposal to put up on your pages. And that probably means a closer fit to the exact search phrase your visitors used to get to your site. So, for example, if a searcher uses the phrase "2002 Nokia cell phones" they'll probably see very specific AdSense ads on a cell phone site they visit. (Cell phones are a highly competitive industry in the search engines).

But if you have a site about rare birds from New Guinea, Google probably doesn't have many options from which to pull AdWord ads to place on your pages. If a searcher uses a highly specific phrase at Google to search for one specific type of rare bird on New Guinea, he'll get to your site and probably see very generic rare bird AdWord links. And less specificity = lower CTR (imho).

John

 

Google's pretty smart.

They log the IP of every click (obviously) and they log the IP of where the account was created, and where it was logged into, which is probably your home or office. If you're doing something blatant and stupid, like clicking on your own ads, they'll find out.

I believe they also conduct proportion hypothesis tests to see if your CTR is out of line with others for a given ad. I have no proof of this (the IP stuff is certain though) but if I were an engineer at Google it'd be the first thing I look for in detecting fraud, and would be very simple to implement.