How to improve cost-per-click (CPC)

Hi Vijaypravin,

First of all, you are focusing on a group of products that are totally free, and most of your traffic will be technically savvy freebie seekers, unlikely to click on ads, and unlikely to purchase anything from your advertisers if they do happen to click. You cannot expect advertisers to pay a premium for such traffic. So you must try to attract a larger volume and accept lower CPC, or switch your focus.

To increase your CPC you need traffic with high commercial intent. There is a huge commercial industry that revolves around certain types of open source projects. In fact, many open source software programs have a much higher total cost of ownership than their commercial brethren.

Here are a few other things you can try:

Feature information about similar commercial alternatives, highlighting any potential benefits of going with the commercial alternatives over the open source product.

Look for open source software that requires customization and typically used in commercial applications. Sometimes, the reason developers choose open source software is for the ability to modify the source code. Those type of programs have a healthy industry that revolves around the custom development of the open source product, so you can attract traffic with much more commercial intent.

Build a community around support options for open source software. Open source software is often too technical for the end user and they will require assistance from specialists. So use sections of you pages to list sources of support for those open source products.