I have been getting the traffic, the clicks and yet low earnings. Guys are telling me that my CTR is low. What is CTR?
I'm sure you are new with adsense, dont worry it happens with everybody in the starting. try and learn from offcial google adsense blog and im surley you'll start rolling with achivements soon.
Good optimization should help to improve your CTR. Read the following tips : * Ad Location - "the middle, above the fold location perform best." Also "if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful" * Ad Formats - "the top three formats are the 336x280 that you see on the page; the 300x250 medium rectangle; and then the 160x600 wide skyscraper." Additionally "the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user." * Ad Colors - Pick colors that blend well with the site. Matches the background color, and compliments the site. Make them feel like a part of the site. They give an example where a customer went from blended background to yellow, and clicks dropped 65% * Ad Blindness - if the colors stick out too much, readers may immediately identify them as ads and not even look at them. Also frequent readers may stop reading ads so you could alternate positioning and colors to get their attention. "The more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur." * Experiment - this was a big theme in the webinar echoed by all experts. Use channels to test different colors, positioning, and formats to find out what works best. They show that you can more than double your revenue just by finding the right color, position, format combo. * Image Ads - If you want to maximize revenue they recommend turning them on. I personally disable them in my account, because I find them too distracting/annoying to the user. Yes you may increase your CPC, but you will probably decrease impressions over time. * Link Units - Don't take up much space, and also "allows the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they'll be able to specify that they're interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear." I also bet google remembers what they click on and then tries to generate better ads for the page... just my speculation. * AdSense For Search - You can use this for your site search, and you get a percentage of ad clicks. * Focus on Content - Duh! * Don't click on your own ads - One of the callers asked the question "I was just noticing that someone asked about clicking on their own ads and it says you're not supposed to. And I don't remember reading that. And I occasionally do click on the ads... So is that detrimental in some way?" - I can't believe they said that to google. Google's response was: "Yes, that's sort of chief among the terms and conditions". * Impression Counter - Google confirmed that Page Impressions are counted when a public service ad (or alternate ad url or color) is displayed. * Your site is unique - all these things may not matter, the best location, format, and color is different for every site. So again, go experiment.
Just to give a little example on the CTR: If you had 8000 ad impressions and 65 clicks then your CTR would be 0.8% so that is correct. 65 / 8000 = 0.8 To make it easier: 100 impressions together with 10 clicks would make the CTR = 10.0%
If you get good traffic but your visitors don't click much on your ads, you'll have a low Click Through Rate (CTR). You have to find out why they don't click. It might be for one or more of the following reasons: - You have a forum or blog - Google has little or no ad inventory for your niche topoic and the ads are not relevant to the interests of your visitors - Goggle can't determine the niche topic of your site and presents unrelated ads which are of no interest to your visitors - Your ads are not placed well on your pages - Your ads are not blended well with your content - You don't have sufficient non-graphic text content - Your site is targeted to technical people, who don't click ads - Your site is too satisfying to your visitors, such that once they view your content they have no interest in clicking on ads - Other
Google Adsense generally has a lower CTR than some other advertisements from reputable companies that you may get from a regular advertising company that serves premium ads but either way what I have been getting for adsense on a few of my website is around 1.05%-2.5% which is still pretty low.