Yet another poorly performing CTR... 0.28%!

[Mapper99]

I have a website which attracts around 10-20k pageviews per day. I believe I have strategically placed Adsense ads, however, my CTR is very low. Any idea what an average CTR should be?

FYI - site is streetviewfunny com

[andynathan]

It might just be a niche with low CTR. The ads that Google showed me were relevant to my business. How long do people stay on your site. My first reaction was what is the site, click. Maybe explaining what the site is and how it works might keep a few people on long enough to click for you. Otherwise, the site looked pretty good.

[Mapper99]

Good suggestion...I actually never though about that. Many people arrive at the site via the "google street view" keyword in a Google search. Looking for Google Street View, then perhaps realizing it is actually not a Google site and bouncing out. I'll give it a try. Thanks!

[yukon]

I can't even get your Index page to stop loading...

Also what's going on with the internal pages URLs, they won't work either.

www.streetviewfunny.com/streetviewfunny/story.php?title=playing-pool-on-the-side-of-the-street-in-a-small-village-in-tibet--

[StarT]

Low CTR seems to be the problem of all social bookmarking sites, one thing you could do is test with different ad colours and sizes, also switch banners to texts and see what happenes.

[Mapper99]

The link you quoted does indeed work:

streetviewfunny.com/streetviewfunny/story.php?title=playing-pool-on-the-side-of-the-street-in-a-small-village-in-tibet--

One option for the site is that when you click on a story, it can take you to the story page, then click again to get to the content. Perhaps I should change that?

[ukcarl]

Looking at your site I would say the major issue is that its likely that people visiting your site are wanting to just look at funny street views its not really any kind of real market as a result your ads are pretty irrelevant.

I would consider who are your visitors what is their demographic and experiment with CPA offers to see if you can get a better return

[WordsofWorth]

You'll have a low CTR for a number of reasons.

Firstly, you have little or no textual content on the site so Google has little or nothing to go in with targeting the AdSense ads. This leads to ads being irrelevant to what your site’s visitors are looking for, and to your site – hence a low CTR. Get some decent content on your site to give Google something to work with for the ads.

Your ads are placed off to the side and in a standard top banner formation, meaning anyone used to the Internet will suffer from ad blindness and will ignore them. Try adding a link unit under your main navigation, and styling your navigation to resemble the link unit. Google has no problem with this, in fact it encourages it.

Finally, try a skyscraper ad (160x600 or 120x600) on the left hand side of the page, where the navigation would be expected to fit. These have a higher CTR.

Unfortunately your RPA will probably remain low due to the nature of the types of ads you’re seeing on your site. Perhaps if you added pages for law firms, courts, government offices etc you’d attract more lucrative ads for related services, rather than ads for ringtones and online games – which are low earners.