Can't we relate these two facts? a low CTR means that people are enjoying the contents of your website! I experienced this with my websites! I have the design for one of my websites that sucks and not appealing BUT i have a very high CTR... on the other site, I have an eye candy website with CTR less than 1%... Another thing to add, when you have a lot of links on your website, the chance so that the people will navigate more on your website is bigger, and when you have very few links, the ads will get a much higher portion of clicks! Give it a shot... remove your links for few hours and notice how the CTR will increase more than 400% Did anyone experience this?
I think a succesfull website is one which gives you sth in return. So low CTR is surely not succesfull first bc it does not give you much secondly you probably have poorly placed ads so you don't know visitor behaviour in your site which is not a sign about succesfull navigation, and very high CTR might be a bit MFA-ish.
IMO, very high CTR = not much content = usually poor quality content. However, low CTR may not be always mean a good site. It may be a result of bad ad placement.
And what do you define as a "successful website"? When I look at that term, I think of a site that is a good source of income, along with quality content. Strive for both.
I'm gaining more and more regular visitors, so my CTR goes down. That's why I'm constantly working on bringing new visitors.
Yes, I agree with you... On one of my sites, that has original and high-quality content, the CTR is less than 1%, I have tried changing ads placement and the ads themselves but with no luck. This site has 35% of returning visitors, more than 5 pageviews/visitor and less than 30% bounce rate... Can it be called a successful site? It doesn't bring a lot of money though...
The best adsense sites are the ones that look real ugly and compell users to get away from them by clicking away. If they use the adsense ads as a mecanism to do this then thats where you'll get your good CTR!