What is Google Adsense CTR?

In the world of Internet marketing, CTR matters a lot. For Advertisers and for Publishers too. Advertisers role is to create such ad graphics or sales line, which should get more CTR and publishers role is to place the ad in such a way, which increases the CTR.

From a Blogger/Publisher point of view, CTR is one of those factor, which plays an important role in generating money and retaining the advertisers. If you failed to give enough click, your advertisers will run away. So, lets dive into the world of CTR and understand what it is.

I have been seeing people asking about this question in many forums so this will be helpful for many of my readers who are not aware of what is Click through rate?

What is CTR?

CTR stands for Click Though rate. In simple words it mean number of times an advertisement is clicked divided by number of time advertisement, ad unit or the page containing advertisement is viewed.

It is the percentage of No of clicks on advertisement and number of page views.

CTR = Number of clicks / Number of exposures.
CTR% = Number of clicks * 100 / # of exposures
So in simple words, if you have an ad running and it’s seen by 100 people but got only 5 clicks, your CTR is 5%. Point to be noted here the higher the percentage of CTR better advertisement you will get. So it’s advisable to place advertisement only at the place which is viewable and can be clicked easily.

Now, one of the most commonly asked question is what is Good CTR and I’m getting enough click on my Adsense but my revenue is very low. Let me cut out the myth about Adsense CTR here, getting too many clicks on Adsense ads will never guarantee good income, the key here is to target ads which gives good PPC. More like, creating blog post/Article with high CPC. On such ads, even few clicks will yield more money than 100 clicks.

Tips to Increase Google Adsense Revenue

Adsense is one of the top advertisement program for Bloggers. We have already talked about why Adsense and even for newbie, we have added complete guide to create Adsense account. Now, it’s time for moving one step further and learn some of the basic and some advance tips to Increase Adsense revenue. There are many tips which are basic but very effective.

One thing which I would like to suggest about placement of your ads is, make sure you don’t violate Adsense policies by putting ads in such a way, that it will make users to click it or never ask someone to click your own ads. Adsense new interface has some easy to use features, which will surely help you to boost your revenue.

Size/Location: 
This is one of the most common factor for getting low and high CTR. You should try putting Adsense ads around the content and above the fold. You can blend the ad with your site design and as I said, above the fold ads perform really great than below the ad fold.

One thing, which normally blogger ignore is link based ads. Link ads are different from banner ad and they don’t decrease the CTR of main ads, if optimized properly. I usually prefer to keep it on the header navbar. When you are designing a website for Adsense income, you should keep Adsense heatmap in your mind. This way you can easily create an adsense optimized themes and design for your new site.

Here are some of the Adsense sizes, which work out the most:

336 * 280 : Large Rectangle
300*250 :
728*90
160*600
As you can see, in Adsense world Size matters.

Organic Traffic. /U.S :
Adsense ads perform the best when your traffic source is from search engine. I also believe, interest based ads might not perform that great if you are getting direct traffic more. Many people complain about low CPC and low Adsense income despite of giving millions of impression/month. This is mostly have to do with CPC and traffic source. Start targeting traffic from countries like U.S.A, U.K and you will end up getting high CPC.

Image or Text Ads:
This is one of the myth of Adsense, that image ads work more. By blocking an ad type or ad category, you decrease the competition on your ad and this also decreases the eCPM of your ads. Prefer to use both the ad type.

Ads between post:
Though, this may give bad reader experience but if you in big time mood to monetize a dead site more and increase adsense revenue, this one works great. You can easily configure adsense ads to match with your page background and color and add 468*60 or text link ads in between post. You can also add 7-10px padding for not giving worse reading experience to your readers.

Placement targeting:
This is one tip which many blogger are not doing. When you create a channel, you have an option to add more details about your ad types and put it for auction in the market by opting for placement targeting. This increases the competition and ad value on your site goes up. To enable this for every custom channel, you have to do it manually. To enable placement targeting on your existing cust. channel, you need to login to your Adsense account > My ads > Custom > Custom Channels. Now, click on one of the name and a screen like this will pop up. Simply add the details and put a tick mark on placement targeting.

Adsense Blacklist URL’s :
There are many advertisers/site which pays really less/click. There used to be a site for getting the Adsense ad black list, but if you have a list of yours or you know about site which perform really bad, you can block that advertiser URL. I have done it and it improved my revenue by 10% in a week time. This also include blocking your competitor ads to display on your site.