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Insanely Low CTR - What Am I Doing Wrong?

by Deebs
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
My website: ProFootballMock (with a dot and a com, natch). *It is a football/humor blog.

In less than a week on AdSense, I have 5,200 pageviews. *But my CTR is a low, low 0.13%. *Thats a grand total of 7 clicks in over 5,000 hits.

For the first few days, I had my ads placed as large rectangles on my sidebars, and was getting virtually no hits. *So following advice from another post, I switched off "interest based ads," and the quality of the ads seemed to improve. *I also relocated the ads, and instead of running rectangles in the sidebars, where no one seemed to be clicking, I made the ads banners that are positioned between the blog posts so that visitors would have to roll their eyes over them as they scroll down the page (I read that this is the best way to place ads for blogs that visitors must scroll down to read). *And STILL, that CTR will not budge. *

I have had only ONE click each day, (except for one glorious day when I had two). *Even on my most visited day, in which I had over 2,000 pageviews, I still had just the one click.

I don't know what my bounce rate is becaue I only just learned about this wonderful tool named "google analytics" that you all swear by. I'm off to install it now. But I know from using hit tracker sites that most people cllick on one page, then bounce away immediately, though the ones who do stay often click through many pages - 4, 5 or more.

Most of my traffic comes from referrals from message boards, primarily reddit and other sports forums.

Any advice woud be greatly appreciated. *Thank you!
#ctr #insanely #low #wrong
  • Profile picture of the author RicJed
    Put your ads inside your blog post, not between them. This works particularly well for text ads like adsense etc. By blending your ads with your content you remove the inherent banner blindness many people have and will increase your CTR.
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  • Profile picture of the author Carl Brown
    in text ads would help. My eyes completely ignore the banner ad at the top. Sometimes you have to make the reader have to work to get past the ads. If they do, and if the ads are interesting, they'll click.

    On one of my sites, I have three 300 ad blocks. The first is aligned to the left. Near the middle there is an ad block aligned right, and near the bottom the 3rd ad black is aligned left. The eye is forced to deal with the ads.

    If you really like those banner ads, you could put one right in the middle of the article. The reader is forced to see and jump over the ad
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    • Profile picture of the author Deebs
      Okay. I will try your suggestions. Thank you!
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  • Profile picture of the author HD Node
    The first thing I would try is placing a 336 x 280 text ad block after the first paragraph in your posts. You would probably get even better results if you placed a block right under a headline, but I wouldn't recommend this as Google don't like it. Larger sites get away with it all the time, but if you upset Google, there will be no explanations or second chances, you will just lose your account.

    I must admit 0.13% is very low indeed, and I'm a little concerned you may have difficulty making decent money from Adsense on this particular site. Some niches just don't convert well I'm afraid and sport can be particularly challenging. If you filled your site with lots of ticket-related articles, for example, then it may be a different story. But taking this type of action will obviously fundamentally change the nature of your site.

    There are, of course, other options besides Adsense (affiliate schemes, CPA, etc.) but it may be that your site is just one of those that is difficult to monitise. If this turns out to be the case, all hope isn't lost, as you will still have a number of good options:
    • Continue to run the site as a hobby. If the quality of your content is good enough, then you may earn freelance comissions.
    • Fundamentally change the nature of the site to target keywords in your niche that convert better and attract a higher CPC.
    • Sell the site of Flippa for a tidy profit.
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  • Profile picture of the author Brendan Mace
    There are a couple of reasons for the low CTR.

    1. Your ads are not in the optimal positions. I was looking for adsense ads and it still took me some time to find them. Most visitors won't be looking for advertisemnts, so you need to put them in a spot that forces their hand a little.

    2. The ads are images. In almost all niches, text ads far outperform image ads. There is an option in your adsense account to enable text ads only.

    3. The ads are completely unrelated to the niche. I saw a netflix ad and an advertisement on cleaning detergent. There probably are not enough advertisers to provide relevant ads for your niche. Unfortunately, this will significantly impact your CTR.
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    • Profile picture of the author Carl Brown
      I'll bet you he could easily increase his clicks tenfold just by making the ads more visible by putting them more "in the way." 70 clicks is a whole lot better than 7. That's still only 1.3%. Imagine if he was able to up that to 13%. Maybe difficult, but not impossible.

      Also, if adsense doesn't work well, there are cpa offers that I'm sure would make a lot of money on that site.
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  • Profile picture of the author GlobalTrader
    I have to agree with Carl Brown - the banner ads just do not attract the clicks that text ads seem to pull.

    I did a quick check on my adsense and the rate was 1.35% for the past 30 days - most of my ads are text, although I allow them to substitute banners if they have them. Actually the rate has dropped over the years - I did an "all time" click thru rate and it was 5.67% overall since adsense was started and the rate was probably higher than that as it has dropped terribly over the past year or two.
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  • Profile picture of the author todawg_not
    I'm not going to explain why just Google "Heat map"

    Then use heat map tracking software like crazyegg to find out where the hottests spots are

    Then place your adsense ads near or on the heat spots (no rocket science)
    (make sure your ad locations don't break Googles T & C's)

    Simple stuff
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    • Profile picture of the author packerfan
      You shouldn't be posting specific numbers... But that aside, there's some things you can try.

      1. Test different ad positions and sizes. Change one thing at a time.
      2. Make sure you allow gambling ads on your site.

      But in reality it seems like adsense is a terribly way to monitize that traffic.

      I'd find something fantasy football related and try that. You could also do amazon with football gear. And see if nfl shop has an affiliate program.

      Good luck.
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      • Profile picture of the author Deebs
        First of all, thank you EVERYONE for the great responses. So much valuable info.

        Here's an update: I signed up with Google Analytics, and found that my bounce rate is VERY high (won't post specific numbers, cause that's bad, right?) Also, the average visitor is on my site for less then one minute, and I have very few returning visitors. This tells me that people are not enjoying my content enough to keep looking through the site, or to bookmark the site for return visits. Now while that is a bummer, I'm keeping in mind that my site, which is NFL Football/humor related, will be of much more interest to people from September through January, so I'm going to give it a few more months before I throw in the towel.

        I've also made some tweaks to the site, keeping in mind the suggestions from this thread. Many of you recommended that I use text only ads. I hate those because they look SO ugly, but if all the data suggests that they're more effective than image ads, then fine I guess. I changed all my ads to text only. (But for what it's worth, there is another site I know of, kissingsuzykolber plus dot plus com, that has a similar "football + humor" format to mine, and that site is quite successful. They have nearly all image based ads, and seem to get the exact same ads from google that I was getting before I switched over to text ads. I will still try text ads for a while to see if they help my CTR, but it still frustrates me that this other football/humor site is successful with image based ads promoting fantasy football, cellphones, and tire brands, while I wasn't able to get more than one click per thousand visitors showing the exact same ads).

        I also went through my allow/block options and tried to be sure that only products that would be of interest to my demo were getting through. For the most part, those settings were good, but I tweaked them some here and there to be sure.

        Several of you said that I should try to place ads within the body of my posts. That's difficult because the blog style of my site displays several posts at once, and because Google only allows three per page, I end up with several blank blue bars if I put them in the post body.

        So instead my ad layout is currently: 1) text-only banner below the header, 2) text only banner just before the first post of each page, and 3) text-only tower in sidebar. I've tried to put them as near to hot spots, as close to post content, and as far above the fold as possible.

        Finally, I hate how my header ad display now leaves a grey sidebar on either side. I've looked and looked, and there doesn't seem to be a fix for this in Adsense, or in my site's theme settings. Anyone have any ideas? (My site's theme is Mantra by Cryout Crations, on the off chance anyone is familiar with them.

        I know this is a lot of info, but I'm such a hopeless newbie that I'm just desperate for any assistance with this project. As always, any advice is GREATLY appreciated. Thank you!
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