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Originally Posted by Pimpen 2010
What is everyones CTR?
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I could tell you, but then Google would have to kill me (so would my boss when the Adsense account got shut down

) - see Adsense T&C.
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Less than 1% low. And then I see people with 10% CTR and 20% CTR and I was wondering if they're just lucky?
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I'd say 2 - 5% is about the best you'll normally achieve from the figures I've seen bounced around various forums although I don't know what our own figures are off hand. Some Adsense banners might get slightly higher by making that the only thing on the page although that's a little iffy with regards Adsense.
A few things however that I've seen which might help Adsense in a legit way...
- As mentioned, making sure the colour scheme matches the site is important and was even promoted by the Google Adsense newsletter a while back.
Sometimes it works to make the backgrounds blend and othertimes making it more stand out.
A couple of examples I know of:
www.ukhotel.com/yorkshire/bradford.html
www.information-britain.co.uk
(first one's ours - second one isn't but click on any link to see Adsense)
- Since we can now have upto 3 ad units per page, that can be a handy way to "encourage" people to click either by spreading the ad's around or grouping them so people don't automatically block out the ad's.
A couple of examples of this are the first site mentioned above where the ad's are page top, after first result & page bottom although in that case they happen to surround the only results.
An ultimate example of this is at:
www.lake-district-links.co.uk
(can you work out where Adsense stops?

)
- You do need visitors and content. I know a lot of people think great we'll put Adsense onto the page with nothing worth reading and we'll get loads-a-money....sorry, it don't work that way.
Essentially making money from Adsense works by the same rules as making money from SEO. You've got to have something worth coming for otherwise the people might come once, but you're fighting for every one of them and won't get repeats & recommendations. Adsense should be seen as an extra, not the reason for a page to exist (as stated in the Adsense T&C).
- Choose a topic which is being bidded on by a lot of people. Although I can't give figures, we have a lot of web sites which make money from Adsense but we've discovered that there is a massive difference between different topics.
For example one of our sites makes an alright amount each month (probably about what John earns in an afternoon sitting in front of his plasma TV

), but another site a pretty heavy amount of traffic makes not a lot....put it this way, I probably make more money waiting for the computers to boot up in a morning than that site makes in a month!
It seems that topic is everything. You've got to be careful in your selections otherwise you can find yourself putting in loads of work for absolutely no gain.
- Almost finally...time to discover the Adsense search box. This handy little addition allows people to either search the web or search your site, but right at the top of the results pops some ad's which credit your Adsense accounts.
Now this is where you can get some pretty serious CTR's from what I hear and I have heard of rates around 20% being banded around (again can't say what ours are, but we don't use that facility vastly currently).
Oh and no, you can't just setup a one page web site, call yourself a search engine and use that. That's classified as creating a page purely for Adsense which isn't allowed. We already checked.
- Finally, don't try to cheat the system. Google might not catch up with things today, but you can be fairly sure within a month or so they'll be on to most new ideas (although I can think of one way to get around it in theory).
Trev - how not to answer a question using 2000 words...
