Camden

Greetings Warriors,

For the last couple of months I've been building a site revolving around Google Trends. While I'm able to drive traffic to the website, I haven't for the life of me been able to get an acceptable CTR to the offers. Traffic isn't a problem, when I release a new article it can easily get several hundred uniques over a night.

When I first started, I used text ads and banners from various CPA offers (freebie/email/ZIP submits) that fit with the demographic, all of which got minimal clickthroughs.

I've recently moved to a poll-style system, in an attempt to get the visitors to proactively click on to the LP. Even this method is met with a lukewarm response.

Do you have any ideas on how to improve the CTR or how to better monetize this site?

GSX Enterprises

What is your idea of a "low" CTR? Having a site with CPA ads that are not directly related to the article/information at hand will always result in low CTR'S. If your CPA offers aren't directly related, try monetizing with AdSense. I ALWAYS go for at least 3%-5% CTR on AdSense and with a few hundred visitors a night, you should get some decent earnings. Having untargeted CPA ads won't help with CTR'S unless you can custom tailor them to each article!

-Amy

GSX Enterprises

P.S. Welcome To The Forums! Read up as much as possible, there's countless invaluable resources out here for you to learn / test / optimize and cash in!

-Amy

downloadvyp

a way to increase the CTR is placing the ads in a better place .that could mean a lot

GSX Enterprises

For sure! Here's a link to the AdSense heat map https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...n&answer=17954 for suggested ad placement!

-Amy

badboy_Nick

OK, heres your problem: Conversion rate!

This means the people arent buying. Why?

- Traffic is crap
- Your offer isnt appealing for someone
- Your site doenst pre-sell

Simple, really! Having lots of traffic doesnt mean the quality is good or you can make money. Look at facebook, their quality of traffic is horrendous and they're the 2nd biggest website in the world.

Read my incredible story: www.affiliatechamp.co.uk

bgmacaw

With a few exceptions, Trends traffic is untargeted, non-buying, traffic. You'll typically see CTR of 0.5-2% as opposed to 10%+ for a highly targeted niche site.

Of course, the goal with trends is to pull in 5000+ visitors in a very short amount of time. Even at a very low CTR this can make you $300-500 in a day from that one page alone.

If you aren't getting that kind of traffic or money you have to look at the trends you're going after (avoid newsy trends like natural disasters and war) and things like ad placement (use in their face big honkin' ads) and traffic count (trends can be hit or miss so you have to have many in play at once).

I don't chase trends as much as I used to because it's easier for me to setup a 'fire and forget' highly targeted niche site rather than chasing the latest trend every waking hour of the day.

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Camden

Hey Warriors,

Thanks a lot for your replies, they are much appreciated.

Hi Amy, thanks a lot for the warm welcome!

Yeah, I have a portfolio of niche websites that have decent clickthroughs, and I expected to get a low CTR on the untargeted traffic with the CPA offers. However, my CTR is at 0.4%, which makes this site a real dud for the amount of time I have invested into it so far.

As comparisons, years ago I had a wallpaper site that ran Adsense and had a decent CTR with totally unrelated ads. Maybe I give Adsense another go, but I usually don't trust running any of Google's tools on my sites.

bgmacaw, your estimate was close, I am generally hitting around 0.4% CTR for the offers, which is dismal.

Yeah, in the beginning when I first started I picked the more "newsy" types of articles, which didn't convert at all. Since then I've mainly focussed on the gossipy tabloid type trends, however CTR is not much better.

Is there any chance I could be using too big of ads? As time went by, the ads continuously got bigger and more dominant. I found myself using some of the biggest banners the offers had available, something I never had to do before. They are placed prominently between the title and the content. The poll questions are right there in the visitor's face, partially within the article, partially at the end.

I know what you mean there, this is the first site I have built around trends and it took partially more time than I was willing to invest for that low of payout.

I like to over-deliver and packed in a lot of content, such as image galleries, videos etc., which may be one of the reasons why people are traversing through the site rather than clicking on the ads. LOL!

Thanks again everybody!