You can not, and you should not try to, increase CTR beyond a certain point. Why? Well, I will write about it later in this article. Most professional bloggers get a CTR between 1% and 3%. If you’re getting a CTR above 2%, you should be happy. But if it is lower than 2%, you should consider ways to increase your AdSense CTR rate. I am going to tell you a few methods with which you can increase CTR. CTR is the click-through rate. It is the number of clicks received for every hundred ad impressions. So, if you display one Google AdSense ad unit on your blog and it is shown 100 times and if visitors clicked on it 2 times; then you’re getting 2% CTR. To calculate CTR rate you can use the following formula: number of clicks / number of ad impressions * 100 The above formula gives you the CTR percentage.
How to Increase AdSense CTR Rate
As I said, by trying and increase CTR rate you can balance the effect of low CPC to some extent. It is important that your website or blog gets a healthy CTR. Let’s have a look at methods that can help you in this regard: This is probably the most obvious and most important factor. CTR has a lot to do with where exactly you place your ads. In general, it is recommended that the ads that are placed within or near the actual content, such ads will get better CTR. Well-placed ads get more eyeballs and therefore more CTR. Which are the best positions for AdSense Ads? BONUS TIP: You should make it sure that the ad with highest CTR is loading first. Bigger ads get noticed rather easily and increase CTR rate. But this theory should not prompt you to use ONLY the biggest available ads! Actually, ads must look naturally and easily fit in the layout of your website. If your ad size will be “odd”, the overall look and feel of your blog will suffer and you’ll lose readers. You should look for the best AdSense ad size that suits your website. There is no universally best performing ad size or type. If you have a good number of regular readers, you should consider the factor of ad blindness. Those readers who regularly come back to your website, they become the so-called “ad-blind”… they become so used to with your blog’s layout that their brain will stop noticing places where you put ads. Remember, readers are coming to your blog to read content and not to see or click on your ads. So, they will ignore ad spaces. As a result, CTR and revenue both will decrease. You can avoid ad blindness by regularly changing the position, sizes and types of your ads. If you’re using other ad networks as alternative of AdSense, some of these networks do provide unconventional ad formats. Such ad formats help in reducing ad blindness. Even if most of your readers are using desktop to read your blog, you must not be ignorant about the importance of having a responsive website layout. If your website is not responsive, you will lose a significant amount of CTR that you could have gained through your readers who open your blog on mobile phones. Check out if your website is responsive. If it is not! Make it! If your website caters to a particular niche, it is more likely that your CTR will be on higher side. This is because Google AdSense is a contextual ad serving program. It serves ads which are related with the content of your website. So, the readers are likely to click ads that are from same or similar domain of information. Quality of content is indisputably most important criteria for the success of your website. Good quality content not only gets you more traffic but also anchors the traffic on your website for longer period. And thereby it increases the chances of higher CTR. This is a the holy-grail of blogging. If most of your website traffic is not coming from search engines, it is not a good situation. I would say that at least 70% of your overall traffic should be from search engines. Visitors who come through search engines are more likely to click on ads because those people are on a quest to find information. Google AdSense provides you with a mechanism of section targeting enabling you to tell Google where your real content is on your blog. Although, Google is pretty good in finding context of your overall page but you can help it by marking sections of your page where you believe the real content lies. Please don’t play tricks with Google. Some people use black hat techniques and try to manipulate ad serving by feeding wrong context using section targeting. All they get is a kick from Google! This is one of the ways that I do not recommend! Heat maps are used in almost all the fields of analytics. These maps tell you where most of the activity happened. Using these plugins, you can get a clear picture of where your readers are clicking on your page. With this information you can better decide placement of your ads. But as I said, I do not recommend this method. I find it totally unnecessary to install a plugin for such a trivial thing. Best placements of ads have already been researched and documented. If your blog or website plays all good, there is no reason why these documented placements won’t work for you. There are several heatmap plugins for WordPress and other platforms. CrazyEgg and HotSpots are among the better ones. You must try to reduce bounce rate of your blog to as low as possible. A lower bounce rate means that readers visit more pages, they see more ads and therefore are more likely to click on AdSense ads. The result? A higher CTR. Although it is advisable that you should make use of maximum number of AdSense ads allowed, but that is only when your website has very good amount of content on every page. Ideally, you would want to place only a certain number of ads in strategic positions. You should remove low performing ads from your page. This will most certainly increase the CTR rate. But such a decision should be taken after careful consideration. You should decide if higher CTR is important for you or the revenue, howsoever low, coming from those low performing ads is more important.
How Much Should Be CTR?
There are some novice bloggers out there who claim to have CTR rate of 25% or above. All this is a lie. Such high CTR rates can not be achieved without playing tricks and doing manipulations (like ads in floating DIV or altering look of ads with CSS). Google badly punishes such attempts of unnaturally increasing CTR. Click-through rate of 2-3% is good. Even up to 5% is also good. But if it is higher than 5%, you should be concerned. This is because Google will take notice of such high CTR and will look deep into your website. If it finds that you’re violating AdSense policies, your AdSense account could blocked forever. How much CTR are you getting? Do you think you need to increase your AdSense CTR? Share in comments and discuss any issue you’re facing regarding CTR. I hope this information was useful for you. Please feel free to ask should you have any questions on this topic. I will be happy to try and help. Thank you for using TechWelkin.
