AdSense Tricks: How to Increase CTR

An increase in CTR can mean a lot to AdSense Revenue. To increase AdSense revenue, either you have to increase traffic or increase CTR.

If somehow, you manage to triple your CTR just by tweaking the Google AdSense code, that equals three times boost in your traffic. Here are a few tips for increasing your CTR.

What Google AdSense Engineers say:

- An email conversation with a Google Engineer:

"Due to the dynamic nature of Google AdSense, fluctuations in your revenue will occur. Your earnings will depend on a number of factors, including the types of ads being served to your pages, the cost per click or cost per impression of these ads, and your users' click through selections. Regarding ad placement - the best ad format varies from page to page. We've observed that, in general, wider ads perform better because of their reader-friendly format. We strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages."

- Google Optimization Guide:

For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the article tends to perform better. It's almost as if users finish reading and asking themselves, "What can I do next?" Precisely targeted ads are just like answering their questions.
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

What Webmasters have concluded

Webmasters have very diverse views on how to increase CTR. It largely depends upon the keywords you are targeting, looks of your website, the quality of its content, placement of AdSense ads, page optimization and various other factors. Generally, AdSense blocks wrapped between the quality content works the best. For the websites having poor quality content, placing the Ads before the start of the content works best.

If you develop a poor quality content website, it will likely give you high CTR and clicks, but you will be getting low priced ads and also nobody will like to add your url to their favorites. But if you have quality content, that keeps the visitors glued, you may get low CTR, but you will be getting high priced ads and regular visitors, too.

Proper positioning of ads on your website has direct impact on your CTR. Change the location of the ads and watch changes in your CTR regularly. Try to locate the area of the page where the focus of the visitor can be. Generally, AdSense ads near the quality content or other crucial areas like navigation bar tend to perform better. But it really depends upon the keywords you are targeting, and the traffic you have. As the Google engineers say, more user friendly ads, more widespread tend to do better than towers and others.

The Traffic

AdSense comes after traffic. No traffic, no AdSense. Take a great care of your traffic. Your visitors expect some valuable information from you. Make sure you are providing quality content to them. This will increase your visitors' return back ratio. And only those visitors will return who are more targeted to the content you are providing. More targeted users mean more CTR. 85 percent of my visitors add my website urls in their Favorites, and most of them do return.

Install a Website stats monitoring software and regularly look at your web logs, and get a handle on where your traffic is coming from. Try to establish a pattern or relation between your AdSense stats and your traffic stats, so that if there are any marked deviations you can make a judgment on why there has been an increase/decrease and what (if anything) you can do about it.
This will give you new ideas to develop traffic.

Experiments

Experiment and experiment a lot, till you are satisfied with the tweaks you have done to achieve highest CTR. Track your page performance by making channels of ads in your AdSense Control Panel and experiment till you are satisfied with your CTR. Though, each such experiment will make you loose money for a day or two, as Google may take time to adjust with new changes, but it will be beneficial in long run.

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