Guide to a Higher AdSense CTR
You may have read my earlier article about AdSense and started to use it, or you use AdSense anyway but this guide will teach you how to get a higher CTR (Click Through Rate) on your website.
CTR is basically how many people click on your ads, so a higher CTR will bring you more earnings. Some sites have a low CTR, this is just a fact. It is know that forums have a low CTR because people want to talk, interact and post but blogs have a high CTR because the visitors want to read and learn.
For this guide I will be using my forum as an example (www.computalk.net), it started out with an incredibly low CTR but now has quite a good one for a forum.
I will also not be posting the CTR of any of my websites since this is against the AdSense ToS.
The first thing that will increase your CTR is blending. You might think that having ads that stand out will attract visitors to the ads and make them click. This is wrong, it will be obvious it is not content and it will look ugly, giving you a lower CTR.
Blending can be accomplished in AdSense by changing all the parts of the ads, especially the background colour.
You may see at my forum (www.computalk.net) I have a header ad, a footer ad and an ad after the first post in each thread. In the header ad you can see that it fits in perfectly with the background since it is the same colour. I have also used the same colour text.
It is now blended in perfectly and doesn’t stand out, this got me a higher CTR. The same applies for my footer ad and especially the ads after the first posts.
Another tip is ad placement. Most people at first (including me) put their ads at the top of their pages near the header image/text, I don’t know why I or anyone else did it.
When people visit a website they are there for the content, by instinct they scroll down to where the content is, zooming straight past your ads if they are in the header, so you get a lower CTR.
If you integrate your ads into your content they will see your ads and will be more likely to click them (the ads will also be closer to content keywords).
A good example of this is the ads after the first post at www.computalk.net, these ads are in the middle of the content and well blended, combining two good CTR boosters to give a very good CTR.
The last tip I am going to give you is keyword optimization. Google AdSense ads display ads related to the keywords of the content of the page they are on. They get the keywords from the keywords META tag and from the actual text.
Do not change your META tags to display off keywords to get a higher CPC (cost per click) because this will lower your CTR and is against AdSense ToS so you will get banned.
If you have a page about Social Networking sites then visitors will go there to read about social networking sites, but if the META keywords talk about chicken curry then the AdSense ads will display ads about chicken curry. The visitors wont want to find out about chicken curry, so wont click the ads.
All of these tips used together can greatly increase AdSense CTR, and the CTR of other ad publishing websites.
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