Page CTR | How To Increase Your AdSense Click Rates

By all means, in the world of Internet Marketing, a good Page CTR is a dream come true for many Advertisers, Marketers as well as Publishers. One of the many roles an Advertiser has is to creatively design ad graphics. Or even a sales line, which should get more Page CTR.

In short, the role of publishers is to place the ads in such a way, that it increases the Page CTR. In fact, I have been seeing people frequently asking about this question in many online forums. And so, in this blog post, I’ll be helpful to many of my readers. Particularly, those who are not yet aware of what is Click-through rate?

From a Blogger/Publisher point of view, your website Page CTR is one of those factors that play the most important role. Especially, in generating money and retaining the advertisers. And for one thing, if you fail to give enough clicks, your advertisers will run away.

However, Click-through rates for ad campaigns vary tremendously. According to Wikipedia, the very first online display ad for AT&T on the website HotWired showed in 1994. Whereby, it had a 44% click-through rate. But, with time, the overall rate of user’s clicks on web page banner ads has decreased.

Since CTR stands for Click Through Rate, let’s define it further and learn how it works as well as how you can increase yours.

What Is Page CTR?

Your site Page CTR (short form for Page Clickthrough Rate) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement.

It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign. For a particular website as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.

In simple terms, it’s the number of times an advertisement is clicked. Then divided by the number of times advertisement, ad unit or the page containing an advertisement is viewed.

As can be seen, it’s a ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it.

Eventually, Clickthrough rate (CTR) can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads are performing.

Here are a few elaborate scenarios with examples;

• For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 5%.
• Each of your ads and keywords has its own CTRs that you can see listed in your account.
• A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads helpful and relevant.
• Your web Page CTR also contributes to your keyword’s expected CTR, which is a component of Ad Rank.
• You can use your Page CTR to gauge which ads and keywords are successful for you and which need to be improved.

Note: A good Page CTR is relative to what you’re advertising and on which networks.

Also, bear in mind that, the more your keywords and ads relate to each other and to your business, the more likely a user is to click on your ad after searching on your keyword phrase.

Related Topics:

1. What is Pay Per Click?
2. Online Digital Marketing | How Do You Get Started?

Does organic click-through rate (CTR) data impact page rankings on Google?

This has been a huge topic of speculation for years within the search industry.

What Is An Organic Page CTR?

Why is there such a debate? Well, often people get hung up on details and semantics (are we talking about a direct or indirect ranking factor?).

Or even, Google patents (which may or may not even be in use), and competing theories (everyone’s got an opinion based on something they heard or read).

To make matters more confusing, Google is less than forthcoming about the secrets of their algorithm. But, if CTR truly does impact Google’s organic search rankings, shouldn’t we be able to measure it? Yes!

In this post, I’ll share some intriguing data on the relationship between Google CTR and rankings. I’ll also share four tips for making sure your Google click-through rates on the organic SERPs are where they need to be.

But to be clear, my goal with this post is to provide just a brief background and some actionable insights about the topic of organic click-through rates on Google. I won’t dissect every tweet or quote ever made by anyone at Google, dive deep into patents, or refute all the SEO theories about whether CTR is or isn’t a ranking factor.

I’m sharing my own theory based on what I’ve seen, and my recommendations on how to act on it.

What’s the difference between a direct and an indirect ranking factor? 

Well, I suggest you watch Rand Fishkin’s awesome video on this very topic.

Basically, we know certain things directly impact rankings (I got a link from a reputable website, hooray!).

However, there are many other things that don’t have a direct impact but nevertheless do impact ranking. Some big-time influencers tweeted about my company (jmexclusives) and now tons of people are searching for us and checking out our site, awesome!

Read Also: Cost Per Click | How to Increase your Campaign Rates

It’s essentially the same issue as last-touch attribution, which assigns all the credit to the last interaction. But in reality, multiple channels (PPC, organic, social, email, affiliates, etc.) can play important roles in the path to conversion.

The same is true with ranking. Many factors influence ranking.

So here’s my response: Direct, indirect, who cares? CTR might not be a “direct core ranking signal,” but if it impacts rank (and I believe it does), then it matters. Further, even if it doesn’t impact rank, you should still care!

But don’t take my word for it that Google has the technology.

Why Does Organic Click-through Rate Matter?

If you have great positions in the SERPs, that’s awesome. But even high rankings don’t guarantee visits to your site.

What really matters is how many people are clicking on your listing (and not bouncing back immediately). You want to attract more visitors who are likely to stick around and then convert.

In 2009, the head of Google’s webspam team at the time, Matt Cutts, was asked about the importance of maximizing your organic CTR.

Here’s a key quote that says it all:

It doesn’t really matter how often you show up. It matters how often you get clicked on and then how often you … convert those to whatever you really want (sales, purchases, subscriptions)… Do spend some time looking at your title, your URL, and your snippet that Google generates, and see if you can find ways to improve that and make it better for users because then they’re more likely to click. You’ll get more visitors, you’ll get a better return on your investment.

In another video, he talked about the importance of titles, especially on your important web pages: “you want to make something that people will actually click on when they see it in the search results – something that lets them know you’re gonna have the answer they’re looking for.”

Bottom line: Google cares a lot about overall user engagement with the results they show in the SERPs.

So, if Google is testing your page for relevancy to a particular keyword search, and you want that test to go your way, you better have a great CTR. And great content as well as great task completion rates.

Otherwise, you’ll fail the quality test and someone else will get chosen.

How Important Is Page CTR?

The Click-through rate is the most important and heavily weighted part of the quality score. What is the first thing Google looks to when trying to get the feedback of users on advertising text?

Of course, CTR! If a particular ad has a higher click-through-rate, it means that the majority of the users find it useful and relevant to what they are searching for. Relevancy is the second most important component. Google considers the relevancy of your keyword to an advertisement.

Similarly, Google uses CTR to understand the relevancy of an advertisement to your website and maintains a quality profile for your website. Sites with very low CTR could be considered poor in terms of quality (exceptions being there).

While the sites with very high CTR, are suspected for activities against google’s policies and have to go through automated and manual reviews.

What Is A Good Page CTR?

Now, one of the most common questions is What is Good CTR? Or rather, am I getting enough clicks on my Google Adsense Account? And also, why is my revenue so low?

In the world of Internet marketing, Page CTR matters a lot to Advertisers as well as to Publishers. Whereby, the Advertisers’ role is to create ad graphics or sales lines. Eventually, which should get more CTR.

And the publishers’ role is to place the ad in such a way that, it increases the Click-through Rate.

The main role of an advertiser is to create an ad or copy that can get higher CTR. Similarly, publishers need to place these ads in a way that they generate the highest CTR for them.

From a publisher’s viewpoint, the click-through rate is one of those essential factors. That helps them generate money and retain advertisers.

If you somehow you’ve failed to give adequate clicks, your advertisers are likely to flee. Therefore, let us dive into the world of click-through rates and understand what exactly it is. But, first of all,

What Is Google AdSense Ads CTR?

When it comes to Google AdSense CTR or click-through rate is the relationship between impressions and clicks. Out of the number of times, your ad or search result is shown to a visitor, how often users click it and not ignore it.

This metric is among some of the most important benchmarks of your toolset for online marketing. It is vital for you to understand its importance in terms of online success.

In a nutshell, Click-through Rate is the number of times an ad is clicked divided by the number of times the page or ad unit is viewed.

And in other words, it is the ratio between the number of page views and the number of clicks on the advertisement.

CTR = No. of clicks / No. of exposures

CTR% = No. of clicks * 100 / No. of exposures

For instance, if you have an advertisement running on your website/blog and it is viewed by 100 people. If 5 of them click on the ad, your CTR would be 5 percent.

On a Pay Per Click (PPC) Model, the higher the CTR percentage is, the better earnings your site will generate for you. Therefore, it is important to place the ad in such a way they are viewable and at the same time not obtrusive. Striking a balance here is important to generate ad earnings over a longer-term.

Read Also: SERP | How do you Improve your Google Search Results?

You must be wondering what a good CTR is. I’ve seen websites performing from anywhere between .05% to a whopping 10%.

It primarily depends on how much time you are spending to optimize your website for more clicks and what niche the website is about. More about this later, but you should also know that the average CTR for the display advertising industry is about 10%.

Then you also have many publishers out there who are getting considerable clicks on their Google Adsense Ads but their revenue is pretty low. Therefore, let’s cut out the myth once and for all.

Getting a huge number of clicks on Google AdSense Advertisements will not guarantee a good income. There are a number of other factors involved. For one thing, you need to targets the ads that can give you good PPC.

Surprisingly, sometimes a single click earns you more than 100 clicks. It all boils down to the eCPM or actual earnings. There are ways using which you can measure the eCPM for ad units/types and optimize it.

What Is A Good Adsense Page CTR?

It is strange how everyone is looking for a satisfactory answer to one question. And that is What is a Good Click-through Rate for Adsense? In that case, let us attempt that with a more suitable answer.

It is necessary for you to understand that it is against Adsense TOS to reveal exact statistics about your account and of course, the CTR. Therefore, it would not be possible to pepper up the article with real-life examples.

And while some blogs do everything to increase their click-through-rate and fail to increase it more than 1 percent, others do get close to the double figures. The majority of the bloggers have CTR between 3% to 50% range.

At this rate, not only blog or website earn a decent amount, but it also stays pretty safe. One the other hand, if your ad units get too many clicks and high CTR, your Adsense account will be exposed to certain risks.

Of course, you must be wondering if you can compare your CTR with other blogs. Unless you know the blogger personally, there is no benchmarking tool for you. Even the AdSense Scorecard, which google calls a benchmarking tool, does not really compare you with our peers in terms of CTR.

Why Is It Difficult To Compare Page CTR?

Simply put, comparing Page CTR, and a number of other Adsense statistics are difficult because every website/blog is incredibly different.

The comparison might even be pointless at times. Why? Because the number of people who click on an advertisement varies tremendously, depending on a number of factors.

Outlined below are some of the factors that play an important role in deciding your click-through rate:

Page CTR Varies Between Different Niche

Surprisingly, CTR varies tremendously from one blog or website to another, even if your blogs have every other factor controlled. The simplest reason that comes to mind is the blog topics.

For instance, many publishers believe that websites with products related topics appear to get higher click-through-rate than other sites. Their argument is pretty valid. According to them, people tend to click on ads more when they are in buying mode.

When they see an ad that meets their requirements or is about the relevant product, they are much more likely to click on the advertisement. Even if they don’t want to buy that product, visitors feel good to explore and find more details about it, which will help them make a decision in the future.

CTR Might Vary Seasonally

CTR, as well as CPC, can, in fact, vary seasonally. The Adsense team mentions this on its support page.

For instance, there are countless blogs out there who claim to have higher CTR on weekends. While some have pretty low impressions throughout holidays, some feel that the holiday season can generate huge variations in CTR.

Of course, these variations vary from website to website, considerably depending upon the visitor demographics.

Relevance Of Google AdSense Ads

Let take this one with an example. Let’s say you’ve got a blog about ballpoint pens. Which ads do you thinks have more probability of being clicked – ballpoint pen ads or dog food ads?

Of course, your visitors are interested in ballpoints and they will click on ads relevant to what you are talking about on your blog. In almost all cases, the more relevant the advertisements are to the subject/niche of your blog, the more likely they are to get clicked.

While there could be few blogs with topics that are difficult for Google to distinguish, but generally Adsense is quite good at this. They have ads for almost all verticals and niches.

There have also been a few cases where bloggers have contacted Google about irrelevant ads, and Google has made changes to fix the problem.

In order to optimize your CTR further, you can also block advertisers which are irrelevant to your domain, if you see their ads/creatives appearing regularly on your ad units.

Page CTR Varies On Visitor Profile Basis

It has been repeatedly reported that websites and blogs with a higher level of repeat (loyal) readers have lower click-through-rate as compared to the ones that have high search engine traffic.

The only logical reason for this problem is that your loyal readers become blind to not only your website design but also the ad positioning, which is why Continuous Ad optimization is needed for a website to maintain a higher CTR.

Read Also: Pay Per Click | Actionable Insights to Improve on PPC Ads

Repeat visitors mainly look at the content, you share with them, so mixing ads in the content, makes sense too. Search-Engine visitors, on the other hand, are mostly looking for specific information. They normally take action, which puts them in an information-gathering mode.

As a result, they are more likely to click the ads on your website or blog. Another group of readers is the one that is referred to like your website or blog by another website. Such readers can choose any course of action, depending entirely on what the referrer is all about.

However, most of the time, CTR is low for such readers. Therefore, do not expect too much from the referred traffic.

Google AdSense Ad Units

There are many design factors that can affect CTR. You need to be very careful here though. You should not, in any case, draw extra attention to the ads by creating animated graphics or putting them inside an obtrusively colored box.

This will only lead to an account ban. However, there are many Adsense publishers out there who have developed some subtle, clever ways to draw the attention of their readers towards the ads.

One important technique that does not break any Adsense TOS is to utilize the areas around your advertisements to your advantage. However, Stats have shown that advertisements perform far better on a clear, white background and white space around them. Why don’t you test between different designs, and see what happens?

Advertisements Placement Locations

An important factor for click-through-rate is the design and positioning of the advertisements on your blog or website.

For example, if you put the ads on the very bottom of the page, there is a chance that very few people will see them, which will definitely result in very low CTR. You don’t want that, do you?

Therefore, you should always position the ads where they can be seen and clicked easily. The same is the case with the colors you choose for the ads. Select the right colors and you are definitely going to improve your CTR.

• Place ads above the fold.
• Merging them with the content.
• Using Wider, instead of longer Ad units.
• Using either a similar or contrasting color theme [Test what works best].

Click-through Rate ‘Click’ Options

Does your blog contain any outbound links other than the Adsense ads? If your answer is NO, there are more chances of your visitors to click on those particular links.

There are countless bloggers out there who are using this technique to increase their revenue. All they do is drive traffic to their website through useful, high-quality content and do not have any other outbound links. Their click-through-rate is normally higher than the pages with outbound links.

Of course, there are a few problems with this technique since you would not be able to interlink your blog. This will not only make your site insular but also makes search engine optimization difficult. De-clutter your blog for better results!

How Do I Increase Page CTR?

Firstly, your site content is the king! You must have read this statement a hundred times, and it is absolutely true.

High-quality content is something that makes your visitor stay on your site and click on the ads. Besides, making a couple of changes to your ads’ placement and types can also boost your click-through-rate.

Outlined below are some tricks you should follow to get your desired results.

1. Epic Content

This is the most important tip anyone can give you increasing your click-through-rate. Great content brings more visitors, resulting in more revenue.

Rather than creating countless useless sites made just for making some quick bucks, take some time out and build impressive content for your blog.

Writing high-quality content is undoubtedly the way to go. It will not only help with your click-through-rate but will also allow you to leverage premium SEO.

Moreover, it will allow Google to place targeted ads on your blog for your audience. Having more relevant ads is the only way to lure your visitors to click them and boost your overall earning.

2. Advertisement Placement

You need to test different placements, positions, and combinations for advertisements on your blog. Avoid putting ads on random positions. Since it will have a negative impact on CTR and your earnings.

What you should be doing is trying out different colors, types, and sizes of ads in order to see what works best for your website. Moreover, you need to keep switching the ad positions.

This technique works pretty well with your regular visitors. Since your loyal readers visit your blog regularly, they start ignoring the ads if they are placed in the same position all the time. This is known as the “banner blindness”. Periodic change in the placement of ads is the only way to cope with this problem.

Do you get frequent suggestions from Google? The majority of bloggers just ignore these emails from Adsense. You should not. Read what they have to say and then test if it’s correct.

3. Ads Modification

Always try new things. Try Modifying the advertisement colors to more bright versions rather than standard AdSense colors. The majority of the Adsense enabled blogs or websites to utilize the standard colors and visitors get used to it.

Changing the colors frequently to brighter shades allow the ads to stand out from the rest of your blog’s content. It will definitely grab the attention of your visitors. Also, you need to make the font of your ads bigger than the content font.

This will allow the user to see the ad immediately. It will make the ads prominent, increasing the chances of clicks.

4. Remove Unwanted Ads

Do you have a lot of posts or pages? Just remove all those ads from the places that do not convert (use heatmaps!) and have very low CTR. De-clutter your blog.

After doing this you’ll see that clicks are no more wasted through unwanted, crappy posts.

5. Suitable Keywords

Keywords play a very important role in gaining search engine traffic.

Since visitors coming from search engines contribute most to the CTR, it is vital for you to understand the importance of choosing the right keywords.

Here is a case study showing how you can increase your CTR and Adsense income:

Takeaway,

The cash you make from Adsense is controlled by quite a number of variables. Such as the number of visitors you get to your blog, and the number of money advertisers are paying in your particular niche. As well as the percentage of visitors that click the advertisement.

Clearly the more ads pay you, the more users you are getting and the more they are clicking on your ads the more money you will make.

Read Also: What are Link Testing Tools?

You must understand that it is not just the niche in general that has such an incredible effect on adverts; it is the relevance that counts a lot. Considering the same example of dating niche, Site 1 offers information on dating sites, so the ads are related to those sites.

This shows that the content of the website and the ads are incredibly close. On the other hand, Site 2 might offer general information about dating, meeting people, starting a conversation, etc.

But if the ads are promoting dating eBooks and websites, there is very little in common between the Adsense ads and the content of the site. This affects CTR to a great extent.

I hope the above-revised guide on Page CTR was helpful to you. But, if you’ll additional contributions, suggestions or even questions in regards to this or even more of our blog topics, please Contact Us.