Adsense CTR for a blog? 0.13% seems low.

[ITMDB]

Now I appreciate most of my visitors are technical minded so will likely have adblocker or ad blindness, but I am currently on a 0.13% CTR for my blog.

Is this normal for a new blog? Currently just over a month old. The blog is in my signature if you need to have a look at it.

Do you think this will begin to improve as time goes by? Or is there something crucial im not doing.

Thanks in advance for any tips.
John

 

[PTTed]

Now I appreciate most of my visitors are technical minded so will likely have adblocker or ad blindness, but I am currently on a 0.13% CTR for my blog.

Is this normal for a new blog? Currently just over a month old. The blog is in my signature if you need to have a look at it.

Your CTR is lower than it could be mainly because your ads aren't embedded in the main body of content on the page (where a person is reading).

Your CTR is also lower than it could be because of the type of traffic, the source of traffic and the mindset of the person who is landing on your site for the most part. For example if a person lands on a page where you show him how to fix a software error in a program, and he is presented with a Google Adsense ad for high speed internet, what percentage of those visitors do you think would click on that ad? Pretty low right?

Now what if you had an article that talked about the most reliable high speed internet service. And you got traffic from search engines from people searching for "most reliable high speed internet service". And your site presented that person with an advertisement for reliable high speed internet service. And that ad was put right in front of the reader inside the main body of content on the page. What percentage of those people are going to click on that ad?

If you think about each of those things, then it will start to make sense why your CTR is so low. This is also why building a site with much more specifically targeted traffic can work better than just having a niche site with random articles somewhat loosely related.

Do you think this will begin to improve as time goes by? Or is there something crucial I'm not doing.

It will only improve over time if you get the ads into higher heat map areas on your site and if you get traffic that has ads that are specifically targeting that traffic.

 

[ITMDB]

ITMDB

Yeah I guess you are right, I see what you mean about the types of people visiting my page. Would be very unlikely that someone would click and advert if they are there for help.

On a side note, how many adverts can you have per page? I wonder if I stick one in the content of the page.

John

 

[PTTed]

PTTed

I believe Google still allows up to 3 ad blocks per page. Read this.

 

[ITMDB]

ITMDB

Okay thanks for that, I now have added a banner in the content of the posts. Hopefully I get an increase on the 0.13%. Do you mind having a little look over the positioning? Hopefully it blends well in the test.

John

 

[PTTed]

PTTed

Yes that is worth trying.

You should try experimenting with different size ad blocks inside the content. Wrap your text around the ads. Offset the ad to the left side of the page or the right side of the page. And have the text wrap around the ad.

When you create the ad in your adsense dashboard make sure you give the ad a special name or a key so that it is very easy to tell what the CTR is for that specific ad that you are testing out.

Just keep testing different things. Give each test about a month to see how things average out before deciding if you should keep a certain positioning. Also pay attention to whether the ad is degrading the user experience on the site or not.

 

[Adam Yunker]

Hey there,

Hmm.. I don't think that many visitors that come to site have Ad Block.. Maybe more than the norm, but I'm guessing most don't.

The best way to get around this problem would be to split testing with Google Website Optimizer. Try putting the ads in different spots or use different colors?

I'm not to familiar with AdSense, but I do understand a bit about it and conversions.

You can also save up a little bit of money and pay for some outside CRO help. They may know what the issue is and can actually fix that for you. As far as that being low? I don't know the average, but in my eyes it seems really low! I thought it was like 1% or 2%?

My best advice would be what I say above, to contact a specialist freelancer and pay them to help you. It's a lot out of pocket, but in the long run it'll be well worth it

Hope this was kind of helpful? Once again, I don't have much experience in AdSense, but I do understand conversions and I thought a post would be better than no post..

Have a great day!

Take care, Adam

 

[ITMDB]

I have just enabled infolinks on the blog, do you think this is to much now? Im not sure I like it to be honest, I feel infolinks are a bit too distracting.

*Edit - Just removed it, ill test the new adsense location first I think.