What it is: It's an image hosting site, but more importantly it hosts a free program that takes screenshots. This program is integrated into the site and makes taking and uploading screenshots a one click process. The program and service are targeted mostly towards PC gamers. My problem: The site has been active for 4 months. We only just finished the application and began posting about it on forums 8 days ago. I have also submitted it to every software review site imaginable. Up until now we average 40-50 uniques a day. The past 8 days we have averaged 881 uniques per day. No matter where I post about the program, people love it. All the responses are overwhelmingly positive, and people seem to be using the service a fair bit, but I was expecting better results. About half the entry visitors are on the display page where an image is displayed, and the other half enter to the download page. So far I have had 8,492 unique visits and 57,531 "pages" (still not sure what that means) this month. And to top it all off, I'm only getting about one ad click for every thousand pages I serve. My confusion: ImageShack ranks in the top 200 on Alexa, so this type of service is obviously a popular one. We made sure to produce a superior service, and we included a top-notch screenshot utility for free. Apples for apples, we trump imageshack in every way but one; we don't allow direct linking. My question: Being new to this realm, what can I do to increase exposure to this site and more importantly the free program?
Your CTR isn't that surprising. After all, they're coming to your site for a service you provide, not for information. Also, based upon where I saw ads (your main page), you really don't have a lot of exposure for the ads (not that I can see any reason to put it on any other pages, save perhaps download, if you don't mind losing some of your initial visitors). Back to your home page ad, you also don't have a lot of text for the ad to contextualize with. Increasing the text on this page, however, removes some of it's simplicity. Re: your stats question, what program are you using? Personally, I recommend http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html for a good overview of what the various terms mean (since AWStats is fairly popular).