In the Internet digital marketing world, CTR (click-through rate) is very important and it matters a lot, not only for advertisers but also equally for the publishers. An advertiser creates an ad and starts a campaign to promote his business. Similarly, publishers place these ads in such a way. They want to get higher CTR but keeping themselves in the safe zone.
What is CTR in Google Adsense?
CTR is the ratio between impressions and clicks. The impression is the total number of times an ad is being shown on your website and click is the count when a visitor clicks that ad. Simply it means that out of the number of times your ad or search result is shown to a visitor, how often he clicks it. Basically, click-through rate is the division of an ad is clicked divided by the number of times the ad unit is viewed.
Click Through Rate Formula
CTR =
No. of ad clicks / No. of ad shown
CTR% = No. of
clicks * 100 / No. of ad shown
So, for example, 100 visitors viewed
your website and obviously ads. If 5 of them click on the ad, your CTR would be
5 percent. As AdSense pays based on the number of ad clicks and impressions, so
the higher the CTR is, the better earnings your site will generate.
What is a good and safe Adsense CTR?
Now, you must be wondering what a
good and safe CTR is. It can actually range from .05% to 10%. It depends on how
much time you are optimizing your website for more clicks and what niche the
website is about. The average CTR is about 10%.
In any case, publishers should keep
on monitoring that getting a high number of clicks on Adsense will not
necessarily guarantee good income. A number of other factors need to be
considered. As you need to target the ads that can give you higher PPC.
Sometimes a single click may earn you more than 100 clicks.
Since it is
against Adsense policy to expose exact statistics about your account and of
course, the CTR.
However, most bloggers have CTR
between .50 to 3 percent. This range is better for earning and also keep
blogger safe. On the other hand, too much higher CTR may put your Adsense
account at certain risks.
Why is it difficult to compare CTR?
Can you compare your CTR with other
bloggers? Unless you know the blogger personally, no online tool available for
you to do that. Even the Adsense Scorecard, does not really compare you with
other bloggers in terms of CTR.
It is
difficult because every website/blog is incredibly different.
Why? Because the number of visitors
clicking ad varies tremendously, depending on a number of factors. Few
important factors are outlined that play an important role in deciding your
click-through rate:-
1. CTR varies between different Niche
Surprisingly, CTR is different for
different websites/blogs. Its main reason is the topic of the blog.
According to many publishers
websites with products related topics appear to get higher click-through-rate
than other sites. As people click on ads more when they are in buying mode.
When users see an ad relevant to the product, it is more likely to click on
that advertisement.
2. CTR can vary
seasonally
CTR, as well as CPC, can, in fact,
vary seasonally as mentioned by Google Adsense on its support page. There is a
number of blogs claiming to have higher CTR on weekends. While some others have
low CTR.
3. Relevant Ads
For instance, you have a blog about
digital marketing. Which ads do you think to have more probability of being
clicked – digital marketing ads or e-commerce ads? Of course, visitors would be
more interested in digital marketing and are more likely to click on ads
relevant to the same. In all cases, the more relevant the ad is to the niche of
your blog, the more likely they are clicked.
Google
Adsense can easily distinguish the topic/niche of the blog. They have ads for
almost all verticals and niches. Few bloggers also contact Google about
irrelevant ads, and Google has made changes to fix the problem.
4. CTR varies on the
basis of your Visitor’s Profile
Websites and blogs with higher
levels of loyal visitors have lower CTR as compared to the ones that have high
search engine traffic. The reason for this problem is that your loyal readers
become aware of website design and the ad positioning, that is why Continuous
Ad optimization is needed for a website to maintain a higher CTR.
Search-Engine visitors are mostly
looking for specific information and are more likely to click the ads on your
website or blog.
5. What’s around the
Ad unit?
Blog/website design and layout can
also affect the CTR. Publishers should not draw extra attention to the ads by
creating animated graphics or putting them inside a colored box, as this can
lead to the banning of their accounts.
One important technique that does
not violate AdSense policies is using areas around your advertisements to your
advantage. However, according to stats, ads perform far better with a clear,
white background and white space around them. Publishers should test different
designs to see what works for them.
6. Placement/Location
of the advertisements
Blog design and ad position is another
important factor that affects CTR. For example, ads on the very bottom of the
page may decrease viewability, which will result in low CTR. So place the ads
where they can be seen and clicked easily. The same is true with the colors for
the ads.
Follow
below points about ad position:-
- Place ads above the fold
- Merge ad with the content
- Wider Ads are more important
than longer
- Use either a contrasting or
similar color theme
Why CTR is so important?
Click-through-rate is the most
important part of quality score. Google looks at CTR to get the feedback of
users on advertising text.
Ads having higher CTR means that the
majority of the users find them relevant and useful to what they are searching
for. Google considers keyword relevancy to an advertisement. Similarly, Google
uses CTR to understand the relevancy of an advertisement to your website.
Google considered low CTR blogs as
poor in terms of quality. On the other hand, sites having very high CTR, are
suspected of activities against google’s policies and may be at higher risk.
How to improve CTR
It is clear higher CTR can help in
revenue optimization. So it is important to increase CTR. Below are some tricks
you can follow to get desired results.
1. Epic Content
This is the most important trick to
increase CTR. Great content brings more visitors, resulting in more clicks and
revenue. Creating impressive content for blog give more positive results rather
than creating countless useless sites. Writing high-quality will not only
increase CTR but will also allow you to leverage premium SEO. Moreover, it will
allow Google to place targeted and relevant ads on your blog for your audience
that are more likely to be clicked.
2. Ad Placement
You need to test different ad
placements and positions on your blog. Ads on random positions may have a
negative impact on CTR and your earnings. Try out different types, colors, and
sizes of ads to confirm what works best for your blog.
Moreover,
you should also keep on switching the ad placement and positions. Ads placed in
the same position may let the loyal visitors ignore them. This is known
as banner blindness. Periodic change in ad position is the only way to
resolve this issue.
Additionally,
you should also keep eye on suggestions from google AdSense.
3. Modifying Ads
Try to modify the ad colors to more
bright rather than standard AdSense colors, as visitors get used to them.
Changing the colors frequently to brighter shades make the ads stand out in the
blog and will grab the visitor. Also, make the font of your ads bigger than the
content font so that users see them instantly. It will make the ads prominent
and are more probable to be clicked.
4. Suitable Keywords
Keywords
play a vital role in improving search engine traffic. Since visitors coming
from search engines are the source of increasing CTR, so use the right
keywords.
5. Remove Ads not
being clicked
Maintain click stats of all ads and
remove ads not being clicked for long. De-clutter your blog. After doing this
you’ll see that clicks are no more wasted through unwanted, crappy posts.
Hi, I’m Abhishek, a digital marketing consultant in delhi
ReplyDelete. I’m passionate about marketing & technology and I’m a Marketing Head at Bliss Marcom, a Noida Based Digital Marketing Agency. I also trained entrepreneurs, students and freelancers in Digital Marketing.
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