Click through Ratio

[smash]

Hi All,

I have a blog I've been working on with quality content, it's listed in the #2 spot for the keyword I've chosen on google. I currently get an average of 80 visitors a day without any advertisement other than the text link ads I purchased last week. I'm going to try some searchfeed and possibly even google ads. I have Adsense and AuctionsAds on the site. They both pull about a 2% click through on them with the AuctionAds failing to have converted at this time. My earnings are approximately $0.20 per day from Google (which has been growing the last 2 weeks now that I've moved my focus from content to traffic).

My question revolves around the 2% click through. I've been moving the ads around the top and bottom footer and the right side. Changing the size of ads and number of Auction Ads versus Adsense. The higher on the page the Auction Ads are the higher the click through (up around 6%). Unfortunately they don't convert though.

So is there a click through percentage that should be considered a bare minimum or a good range to shoot for? This is my first venture into marketing I've always been on the Creative, Technical and Operations side of things. The marketing guys were just the ones who always changed their mind to screw up our schedules!

Thanks,
smash

 

[Aequitas]

Your traffic levels are still quiet low to be raising your CTR, have a look and see how long those visitors are staying I bet around 50% or more are leaving inside the first 30 seconds, any web statistic tool should give you this information, work on getting more traffic first, find a decent place to put your ads for now.

Blogs can be a bitch sometimes, the best thing about a blog is that you CAN get a high CTR if you've got a decent amount of return visitors, this is based upon my own stats, return visitors will click twice as many ads then a first time visitor will.

As a bit of an example one of my newest blogs which is in the top 10 for a decent Google keyword just started averaging 200 first time visitors per day (Organic Traffic) and has a super shitty CTR of 1%, so far I've only gotten around 5 to 8 return visitors on average.

Now another one of my blogs which is about a month older only gets on average 100 first time visitors (Organic) but it gets on average 20 return visitors per day, this particular blog has a much higher CTR and earns much more money even though it pulls in less traffic then the other one.

Now in about a month's time this will all change my higher traffic blog will take the lead but the whole point is getting return visitors because once you've got a decent amount of return visitors (Or the majority staying for more then 2 min) its much easier to test out Ad locations and CTR.

 

[smash]

Thanks Aequitas.

I am running Google Analytics and Awstats on the blog. My return visitors run at 24% right now with 66% of people leaving in the first 30 seconds. I'll keep working on that traffic.

 

[Aequitas]

Thanks Aequitas.

I am running Google Analytics and Awstats on the blog. My return visitors run at 24% right now with 66% of people leaving in the first 30 seconds. I'll keep working on that traffic.

Yeah don't be discouraged by the 66% of people leaving your blog when you first get things going its a common theme among most things. As well your return visitors are pretty good for being new as well, keep it up and things will start to pay off.

I also noticed that you've got Adsense on your site, are the ads being displayed correctly? (I mean are they targeted), you can also run by the Adwords external keyword tool and toss in some of your keywords that you use in your posts to get an guesstimate of what they should be paying. As well you can use a few other Adsense tricks like wrap the following tags around your keywords or your entire post if you wanted too.

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

You can even go one step further to wrap these tags around the content that you don't want Adsense picking up any keywords from.

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) -->

You might have known all of that but I thought I would mention it just in case, all of that will help target your Adsense ads a lot better.

 

[smash]

WOW!!! Thanks, I had no clue I could alter what type of ads are served. I do get some strange ones that don't exactly fit on some of the pages. This will help tons!!

I'm actually pretty happy that 32% of the people are staying for a little bit.

Man, so much information out there, I do more reading and learning than actual doing. Thanks again.