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Sudden plunge in site's CTR???

by jl255
5 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Anyone experienced this before? Just ONE of my site's CTR just dropped by more than 50% overnight. This has happened for the past 3 days.

- Pageviews and CPC have not changed for this site.
- Visitor demographics (location) are unchanged.
- Traffic & impressions are unchanged

It's only CTR dropping by more than 50% resulting in alot less clicks and revenues dropping by more than 50%!

The rest of my sites were unaffected.

Anyone knows why this might be happening? Really quite worried now
#ctr #plunge #site #sudden
  • Profile picture of the author jpg000
    I have the same problem. Overnight our CTR dropped on our largest site in the two primary banner locations. We've had the same average CTR for years and in the last few months, it is down 60-70%. This was not a gradual drop like the audience was slowly becoming oblivious to the ads. It happened in one day. We have checked everything, including running ads in the same location from another ad server.

    Audience behavior on a web site does not just all of the sudden change one day - and especially this drastically. There has to be a reason. I've found other reports like the one in this post, but no explanation as to why it happened.
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi jl255 & jpg000,

      In addition to on page factors like layout and page topics, there are many other things that can effect your CTR, including some that can, and sometimes does, change overnight.

      1. Traffic source - Perhaps the most significant factor effecting CTR is your traffic source, if there was a sudden change in your traffic sources then you will likely see a big change in your CTR. For example, if you recently started to rank for a keyword that is not extremely well targeted you could see your average CTR drop.

      2. Advertiser Auction - PPC programs like AdWords are auction based so new advertisers can move into the keyword market at any time and their ad text or image may not generate as high of a CTR from your audience. Or, a longtime advertiser that gets high CTR may pull out of the auction completely, or block your website if they are not getting high enough conversions.

      Due to the auction based nature of ad platforms, it is extraordinary to have a CTR that does not fluctuate at times.
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      • Profile picture of the author samuliakin
        This happened to me before too and it took me a couple months to figure it out. I had some work done to my site and either the guy hacked some files or the password setting was too easy for my ftp files. Either way they put a redirect script into the htaccess files that would send the visitor away from my site. It would only work on new visitors coming from the major search engines. Existing users who come directly wouldn't see the redirect, me. So it would keep the pv's up, but the ad ctr dropped.

        I'd check your htaccess files not only in your root directory but all folders, i found the htaccess file everywhere with the malicious code.
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  • Profile picture of the author jl255
    it has been 2wks and my site's CTR has recovered slightly. actually i have come to conclude that it is google's search traffic that has changed. they are probably sending different types of visitors to our sites as they changed their algorithms. while the traffic has not dropped but it cld be a different group of visitors, who are not as well targeted as they used to be. thus explains the drop in CTR.

    for those experiencing such sudden drops in CTR, are a majority of your traffic coming organically from google? if so, my conclusion seems correct.
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    • Profile picture of the author itworked
      Hi jl255, curious whether CTR is back to normal now?
      In answer to your question about traffic sources, yes, my traffic was almost all google organic when it happened to me. I'm waiting for a recovery.

      Dburk's comments make a lot of sense and it is possible that someone was targeting our site for advertising and then moved on to other pastures.
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