Google AdSense is perhaps the most reliable way for professional bloggers to earn income from blogging. Bloggers display Google ads on their blog. When their readers click on such ads, bloggers get a share in revenue from Google. Click Through Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Click (CPC) are the two major factors that determine the income of an AdSense publisher. We do not have any control on CPC, so if you’re getting low CPC, you’ll have to live with it. Therefore, bloggers often focus on how to increase AdSense CTR rate. By increasing CTR, bloggers hope to mitigate the effect of low CPC.
You can not, and you should not try to, increase CTR beyond a certain point. Why? Well, I will write about it later in this article. Most professional bloggers get a CTR between 1% and 3%. If you’re getting a CTR above 2%, you should be happy. But if it is lower than 2%, you should consider ways to increase your AdSense CTR rate. I am going to tell you a few methods with which you can increase CTR.
CTR is the click-through rate. It is the number of clicks received for every hundred ad impressions. So, if you display one Google AdSense ad unit on your blog and it is shown 100 times and if visitors clicked on it 2 times; then you’re getting 2% CTR.
To calculate CTR rate you can use the following formula:
number of clicks / number of ad impressions * 100
The above formula gives you the CTR percentage.
How to Increase AdSense CTR Rate
As I said, by trying and increase CTR rate you can balance the effect of low CPC to some extent. It is important that your website or blog gets a healthy CTR. Let’s have a look at methods that can help you in this regard:
This is probably the most obvious and most important factor. CTR has a lot to do with where exactly you place your ads. In general, it is recommended that the ads that are placed within or near the actual content, such ads will get better CTR. Well-placed ads get more eyeballs and therefore more CTR.
Which are the best positions for AdSense Ads?
- Right below post title
- After two paragraphs in the content
- At the end of the post content
- Top of the sidebar Sidebar
- Header
To increasing CTR place your ads well. Best placement of advertisements on a typical Blog / Website homepage.
To increasing CTR place your ads well in blog posts. These are the best placements of ads on a post / article page.
BONUS TIP: You should make it sure that the ad with highest CTR is loading first.
Bigger ads get noticed rather easily and increase CTR rate. But this theory should not prompt you to use ONLY the biggest available ads! Actually, ads must look naturally and easily fit in the layout of your website. If your ad size will be “odd”, the overall look and feel of your blog will suffer and you’ll lose readers.
You should look for the best AdSense ad size that suits your website. There is no universally best performing ad size or type.
If you have a good number of regular readers, you should consider the factor of ad blindness. Those readers who regularly come back to your website, they become the so-called “ad-blind”… they become so used to with your blog’s layout that their brain will stop noticing places where you put ads. Remember, readers are coming to your blog to read content and not to see or click on your ads. So, they will ignore ad spaces. As a result, CTR and revenue both will decrease.
You can avoid ad blindness by regularly changing the position, sizes and types of your ads. If you’re using other ad networks as alternative of AdSense, some of these networks do provide unconventional ad formats. Such ad formats help in reducing ad blindness.
Even if most of your readers are using desktop to read your blog, you must not be ignorant about the importance of having a responsive website layout.
If your website is not responsive, you will lose a significant amount of CTR that you could have gained through your readers who open your blog on mobile phones. Check out if your website is responsive. If it is not! Make it!
These tips will help you using Google AdSense in much smarter way.
If your website caters to a particular niche, it is more likely that your CTR will be on higher side. This is because Google AdSense is a contextual ad serving program. It serves ads which are related with the content of your website. So, the readers are likely to click ads that are from same or similar domain of information.
Quality of content is indisputably most important criteria for the success of your website. Good quality content not only gets you more traffic but also anchors the traffic on your website for longer period. And thereby it increases the chances of higher CTR.
This is a the holy-grail of blogging. If most of your website traffic is not coming from search engines, it is not a good situation. I would say that at least 70% of your overall traffic should be from search engines. Visitors who come through search engines are more likely to click on ads because those people are on a quest to find information.
Google AdSense provides you with a mechanism of section targeting enabling you to tell Google where your real content is on your blog. Although, Google is pretty good in finding context of your overall page but you can help it by marking sections of your page where you believe the real content lies.
Please don’t play tricks with Google. Some people use black hat techniques and try to manipulate ad serving by feeding wrong context using section targeting. All they get is a kick from Google!
This is one of the ways that I do not recommend! Heat maps are used in almost all the fields of analytics. These maps tell you where most of the activity happened. Using these plugins, you can get a clear picture of where your readers are clicking on your page. With this information you can better decide placement of your ads.
But as I said, I do not recommend this method. I find it totally unnecessary to install a plugin for such a trivial thing. Best placements of ads have already been researched and documented. If your blog or website plays all good, there is no reason why these documented placements won’t work for you.
There are several heatmap plugins for WordPress and other platforms. CrazyEgg and HotSpots are among the better ones.
You must try to reduce bounce rate of your blog to as low as possible. A lower bounce rate means that readers visit more pages, they see more ads and therefore are more likely to click on AdSense ads. The result? A higher CTR.
Although it is advisable that you should make use of maximum number of AdSense ads allowed, but that is only when your website has very good amount of content on every page. Ideally, you would want to place only a certain number of ads in strategic positions.
You should remove low performing ads from your page. This will most certainly increase the CTR rate. But such a decision should be taken after careful consideration. You should decide if higher CTR is important for you or the revenue, howsoever low, coming from those low performing ads is more important.
How Much Should Be CTR?
There are some novice bloggers out there who claim to have CTR rate of 25% or above. All this is a lie. Such high CTR rates can not be achieved without playing tricks and doing manipulations (like ads in floating DIV or altering look of ads with CSS). Google badly punishes such attempts of unnaturally increasing CTR. Click-through rate of 2-3% is good. Even up to 5% is also good. But if it is higher than 5%, you should be concerned. This is because Google will take notice of such high CTR and will look deep into your website. If it finds that you’re violating AdSense policies, your AdSense account could blocked forever.
How much CTR are you getting? Do you think you need to increase your AdSense CTR? Share in comments and discuss any issue you’re facing regarding CTR.
I hope this information was useful for you. Please feel free to ask should you have any questions on this topic. I will be happy to try and help. Thank you for using TechWelkin.
I get almost 1k-20k impressions a day. and 1k-18k pageviews in average a day. but my ctr is around 1-2% :( with 0.03 cpc 😥
Everyone has this issue don’t worry. Try to increase traffic
Very useful and Advace tips to increase Adsense ctr. I am a new blogger. But i can understand this content easily.
Thanks for valuable post.
Hello,
After Reading your blog and some comments I am Happy with my CTR because it is around 2-3%.
Thanks
hey nice article
I usually get 2-4% of CTR but suddenly my page ctr goes 12.9% it shows on mobile AdSense app.
but when I logged into Adsense pc website in that it doesn’t show page ctr it shows only CTR and in that, it is 6%
can you help me with this and I didn’t click or do invalid clicks
is this usual?
and where can I see my page ctr on pc
Nice Article! Very well written. CTR is actually one of the most important factors in Google AdSense. My CTR percentage is very low. I have placed 4 ad units and one page level ad. A total of six ads are visible on my website. Do you have any suggestions for improving My CTR percentage in this scenario?
Your website does not have enough traffic to worry about CTR. You should work more on content. But it is advisable to reduce the number of ad units a bit.
I am surprised this morning to find the page CTR up to 33.33% and I think that was an illegitimate click. I am not sure if I placed my ads against AdSense policy on my site. As for the Ad CTR is 20%. I did a Google search and I landed here. Is this CTR normal? Thank you.
You have only three pageviews and one click. This is why your CTR is so high. This is too small data to be considered. You should look at CTR when you’re getting at least 100 pageviews a day.
great information, I would like to use heatmap, it helps me… what you say about this?
Thanks a lot, this is a great article and by implementing these tips it improved my AdSense CTR.
99% of website traffic is from google, but my CTR always remain below 1%. I tried every thing but the ctr is not increasing. Should i use float ads?
Daily CTR matter or life time?
I’m getting more then 20,000 visitors daily on my web and Lifetime Page CTR 3.94% and Impression CTR is 1.12% is it good??
hello, pls my CTR is very low, i am talking about a CTR of 0.0002.. i have read your articles and made some changes hopefully it will increase but pls what do you think i can do?… i have like 1500+ visitors a day
Wonderful methods to increase adsense CTR. i will try all those methods on my site.
Thanks
nice tips, hope will be good to me too.
Really nice Post. My suggestion is if you use the case study to explain, your blog users will feel more comfortable with that. After reading your post I changed few things in my blog. Those are very useful in increasing my CTR. Now I am getting CTR 3% to 4%. That feels good to me. Thanks for sharing such a nice article.
Hey Lalit,
Thanks for posting such an informative article about CTR.
I’ve a website that’s getting more than 1 million ad impressions a month (as I’m getting more than 300,000 pageviews/month and each page has 3 ad units..
But the CTR is low @ 0.6%.
I know if I can double that CTR to around 1.3-1.5% I’ll be making way more money than what I’m currently making.
Can you please help?
Thanks
Great post, my ctr is good, thank god i have not any mistake to decrease my CTR
Hi Lalit.
Thanks for the good article.
Here is my question: You write “If you getting a CTR above 2%, you should be happy”
My AdSense there are two values “CTR Impressions” and “Page CTR”, “CTR Impressions” = 1.2%, and “Page CTR” = 3.1%
I want to ask, what value (CTR) You mean (CTR, Impressions) or (Page CTR) when he said that 2%+ is happiness?
Thanks if you answer, it’s important to me.
Hi Alexander, I meant the impressions CTR. That is to say the number of clicks your get for every 100 ad impressions.
Thank you. Really amazing post.
My impression is about 2200-3000 per day, page view is about 700-1000, and my page CTR stays about 2.5-4 % . Is that fine?
Would really be helpful if you replied.
Thank you.
It’s a very good CTR I would say.
Hi Lalit,
Really useful post indeed, I am also facing very low CTR on my blog as 0.30 – 0.50% . Can you please look over on my blog as it is new but and I am getting 600-800 impressions daily but CTR is very low.
Waiting for your reply.
Thanks
– Pranay
As I have told many other people here, 600-800 impressions is not enough traffic to worry about CTR. Just focus on good content and wait until traffic increases.
Can I use affiliate program (5 Amazon ads) along with 3 AdSense ad units?
Yes, you can use as many affiliate ad units you want to use. But our research has shown that it does not really help. So, keep the total number of ad units not more than five per page.
Hi Lalit,
Very good article and very helpful, my site went responsive in May 2015 and the CTR prior to that was 2/3%.
Now its responsive its plummeted to 0.5% ever since this change, don’t get me wrong I have been working hard to get the site back up in the SERPs but the CTR is shocking it could be a design issue.
There has been a recent up surge with the work that is being done and I call it critical mass factor where Google AdSense CTR is directly proportional to the traffic i.e. up to 1000 search engine visitors per day gives you something like 0.70% CTR and it gets better and better after your visitors increase coupled with bounce rate also being factored into this equation.
I have put the ‘rectangle’ into my as code as suggested but I am sure I have done this before and did not see much difference in the CTR on this site!
Hi Steve, responsive design is the need of the time. It can only bring you benefits and can not cause any problems. As far as I can estimate, your website does not have enough traffic to be able to realize a stable CTR. Low traffic causes CTR to fluctuate a lot. So, as I advise everyone else, first you should focus on content and traffic. Once you have let’s say over 1000 unique visitors per day, then you can think about CTR rate. CTR is mostly affected by the layout of the website. Your website’s design is good and responsive. You should not worry about CTR. Focus on getting good content and traffic.
Hello Mr. Lalit
Thank you for sharing your information. I want you to review my website once and suggest me the changes. My page CTR is 0.94% and impression CTR is 0.25%.
Your website does not seem to have enough traffic. Don’t worry about CTR, focus on content and traffic.
First of all thanks for this great article. my website got 1000 to 15000 visitor per day with a bounce rate 78%. I use responsive theme since the beginning. My website is more that 2 years old. New visitor 20,000 – Returning visitor 5000 (in a month). Although I try best placements of ads but gradually CTR is decreasing. At present my CTR is .33%
Can you please have a look to my blog and give me your wise suggestion. Thanks again
Rashal, I have seen your website. It needs a lot of work for improvement. You’re traffic appears to be coming mostly from social media or referral sites. This is the reason your CTR is low. Search traffic converts the best. My suggestion is that you improve layout and content quality of your website.
I have a lot of page views but no CTR. Can u please suggest me how to place ads to increase CTR?
Shuvam, I have checked your website. I don’t think you’re getting enough pageviews to have decent CTR. I would suggest to focus on writing quality stuff to increase traffic on your website. CTR will increase only with increasing traffic.
Great Article.
This is one issue that we have been struggling with.
Our CTR is is very low .30 to .40, is it possible for you to take a quick look at our site and suggest any changes.
Really appreciate your response
Thanks
Hi Daniel, you still don’t have enough traffic on your website to properly measure CTR and take corrective actions. I would suggest you to focus on increasing traffic.
Dear Lalit,
Thanks for your amazing article. It really helps me. Meanwhile I’ve a question to you.
I’m using Google AdSense from last couple of weeks. Ad impressions in my first site (approved by Google AdSense) is okay. But the problem arise for two other sites that I have connected under the existing account. I’ve added them through site management and listed them as authorized site too. Earnings are also counted in the report. But the main problem is that the number of ad impressions is very low! I am using 3 AdSense ads on each page.
For example, in the AdSense report if number of page view is 100, number of impressions lies around just 15-20 ! What’s wrong that ?
I have around 20-25 thousand page views under each connected site. I’m a newcomer in AdSense and don’t understand it at all. I will be glad if you kindly suggest me something to solve the problem.
Thanks.
Hi Rajesh, if your content is not of high quality, Google will not show ads even if you have placed ad units. So, your page view count will be high but number of ad impressions will be low. Just placing the ad units does not guarantee that an ad will be shown in those places. If your coverage is low, you should make sure that your website’s content is good enough to receive ads.
Hi Lalit,
1. My website is 3 months old now.
2. I get more than 500 visitors per day.
2. I am publishing Adsense ads on my website but visitors are not clicking on my ads.
3. Kindly help.
Well Amar, apart from the factors I explained in the article, the CTR also depends on content quality. Moreover, if most of your traffic is from social sites, the CTR is likely to remain low.
An amazing article. I want to know if it has any scheme of colors to increase the CTR on adsense that you consider as the best one for blogs with white background for example.
P.S.: I’m also studying the psychology of colors and how this effects people.
Hi there, thanks for liking the article. Color scheme of your ads should be decided according to the color scheme of your website. There can not be a universally good ad color scheme to get higher CTR. In relation with the color scheme of your website, you can either go for gelling ad colors or for contrasting ad colors. My experience says that both these approaches work almost equally well. But of course, it also depends on the niche of your website.
Hey Lalit,
I’ve been an AdSense Publisher for more than 6 years. Until the 1st quarter of this year (2015), my CTR was averaging about 3%. I was so happy with my AdSense income. But I don’t know why CTR has significantly dropped now. The number of visitors to my website has actually increased. But the current CTR is less than 1%.
NOTE: I haven’t changed the ads placement or size etc. I would appreciate if you could take a look at my website and give me a specific advise. Thanks!
Hi Rehan, the biggest problem with your website is that it is not responsive. I would strongly recommend that you begin to use a responsive theme. Now, Google is heavily favoring the mobile-friendly websites.
My website’s CTR has dropped significantly since the last month. Earlier I used to get 2% to 3% CTR, but now my CTR is barely 0.5%.
My recommendation would be that you upgrade your website to a mobile-friendly version.
Hi
Thank you so much for such this very useful information. I wonder which type of ad you are using in the second place on your website? It is like link ads, but I could not find any :-)
Hi Phan, nowadays, I am using responsive ad units.
I mean the second Ads units in your content. I can not gain such that text ads using a new responsive one. My content length is exact 720 px.
Just select responsive ad unit, give it a size of 720px and whatever width. Then Google decides what it wants to show in that space. The ads delivered in your ad space depend also on a lot of other parameters. So, don’t worry and keep writing good stuff.
Hi Lalit,
I am facing a problem, I have 8k to 10k daily visitors from Facebook and 95% of that is from USA. But my CTR is always less than 0.40%. Can you please check out whats the issue. I shall be very thankful.
Hi Asad, Facebook traffic generally does not convert. You need to have more search engine traffic if you want to increase your CTR.
I can’t understand relation between CTR and Page Impression please discus about it…
Hi Paresh, Page View is the count of number of times a page has been loaded. If you have one webpage with two ad units on it, and the page is loaded only once… then the page view count will be one and ad impression count will be two.
Hi Lalit,
Awesome article. My site CTR is very low, so you help me a lot. Thanks for sharing this post. It’s helped me. One more question. How to increase page traffic on my website? Thanks
Hi Riya, there is only one way to increase traffic on your website, and that is to produce good quality content. You keep doing that and rest all will fall in line.
Great content Lalit Kumar! I found that my country is paying such low CPC here in Malaysia. Hope this will get me as high CTR as possible. thanks.
Hi Jawatan, we can not do much about CPC but in many cases, experiments will reveal that you can indeed get a higher CTR. All the best and stay in touch with TechWelkin!
Hi Lalit. My name is Noroz. I am also confused about my page CTR. Is it good to put just text ads to get more click or both text and images. waiting for your reply.
Hi Noroz, you should enable both images and text ads. It is also recommended by Google AdSense. But enabling text/image ads has more to do with better CPC than with better CTR. You need to do placement experiments to see where and how you get better CTR.
Hi Lalit, I am in a big problem.. I have a huge traffic from facebook more than 90% and content is related to entertainment you can have a look on my website plz. My main problem is my CTR and CPC. My CTR is only 1.2% and CPC is only $0.10 and sometimes even lesser than this. I am sharing links on my pages but the amount I am earning is very less and it is giving me huge loss. It will be pleasure if we can talk. I really need your help to assist me. PLEASE HELP!!
Hi Madhur, I had a look at your website. First, CPC grows only with traffic and trust that Google pose in the website in question. Your website is pretty new, it has interesting stuff but this content is not original. Your income from website will not increase unless your search traffic will improve. Facebook traffic does not bring money. All the best for your future work!
Hello Lalit Sir,
My CTR is suddenly fall down from 1.40% to .70%.
I have placed ads.. 1) bellow the title 2) after 2nd paragraph, 3) Top of the sidebar.
What should I do now. Feeling very unlucky :-( :-( please help
Hello Biplab, CTR keeps going up and down. You should be concerned if CTR goes steadily down over a period of one month or so. I have seen your website, you must not use floating Google AdSense ads. Its not allowed. At present, you’re using an ad unit in header which floats when user scrolls the screen.
Before Some Time My CTR is between 2.0% to 3.0% and RPM is also 2.0% to 3.0% but now these days my CTR and RPM both are decreasing. My traffic is between 20000 to 25000 but revenue is very low. Please guide me to increase my revenue income
Dear Surya Kant, CTR and RPM keeps on fluctuating. They sometime go up and sometime go down. It’s natural. Don’t worry.
Thanks for sharing the good info with us Lalit. Apart from the placements content fonts and color of the AdSense ads should be relevant to the website.
Yes, Kranthi, placement, color, type and size of ads affect the CTR rate. You should experiment and see which combination works the best for you.
Nice post and simply good.
Very informative and versatile tips on google adsense. Hope it will be helpful for beginner blogger like me who wants to increase their AdSense income. Thanks for nice article.
thanks for sharing beautiful structure..
i have a question my ctr as well as impression drop suddenly in adsense and cause 50% drop in earning any solution?
i did not change the position yet
Tanvir, if your search traffic is not enough AdSense CTR will go down. If most of your visitors are coming as direct or referral traffic, CTR will indeed fluctuate.
Hi brother, thanks for the great piece and how you take out time to respond to people's comments. Please can you help me assess my site; seunsblog.com. My CTR has been low lately. I was doing ok on the past. Hope to read from you soon.
Thanks a lot got your time and concern.
Hi Seun, CTR usually doesn't change significantly until you change the layout of your website. If you have changed the look and layout of your website, you may need to review it.
I am looking for ways to boost my CTR on my site. It currently sits around .68%. Please advise.
Well, Celestina, I have advised 10 ways to boost AdSense CTR in this article. Please read carefully and implement.
Great ways to increase adsense income. Google Adsense is the best advertising program and is the only source to make money from my blog. Thanks a lot for the awesome tips to increase adsense revenue. :)
I'm a rank newbie at Adsense. Our CTR is a dismal 0.19%. We have a good responsive layout (according to Google – we are mobile friendly.) We have a lot of good content (around a dozen new 200-400 word articles/day) and can drive traffic from a very active facebook page (weekly reach between 10 and 25 million). Hence, we average over 26,000 page views per day. But with our dismal CTR, our Page RPM is around $0.93. I've done much of what you suggest in your article and will try more of it, but I feel like I'm missing a very big puzzle piece. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Tim
Tim, that missing piece in your puzzle could very well be low traffic from search engine. Traffic from search engines converts the best. Visitors coming from a search engine tend to click more on your ads. Moreover, your website seems to be new (3-4 months old?) … So, you need to be a bit patience before search engines begin to send traffic towards your website.
Lalit,
Thanks for your insight. Our site is actually much newer < 30 days old. Perhaps patience is indeed in order.
Thanks,
Tim
Hey,
My average CTR 0.76% and after reading your article I hope I can increase the CTR.Coming to heat maps we can also use SumoMe plugin.I am using SumoMe just for the purpose of adding share buttons but now I will also use their heatmaps feature.
I have a website where 90% of traffic comes through google adwords (only google search network) , and the real problem is avg.cpc i am paying for a click is very much low and revenue i am getting via adsense is very high.
I have reasearched for 5 years, and found out this niche where no other competitors are advertising for those keywords.
My questions is, is this okay with adsense policies?
my bounce rate via paid traffic is 28%, pages/visit – 4, avg. time spent on site – 3.12 mins. infact when comapred to organic it is slightly better. So can i continue with out any problem?
Hi Girish, as far as Google AdSense policies are concerned, there will not be any problem in this scenario. You're not violating any AdSense policy by bringing in paid traffic through AdWords program.
I think this tips is very helpfull.. in my cast, many visitor from mobile… so, im confuse what ads can i put in the blog.. Im try use ads size 336×280 in up, middle and buttom article.. but CTR is low, between 1,5% – 2%.. So, my can i do for my ads??
Hello Priyadi, CTR of 2% is not bad. You should focus on producing good content and increasing your traffic.
Hi Lalit, This is a great guide for Newbie and Experienced Bloggers about Proper Ad Placements, My CTR has also been very low, going to try these techniques.
Thanks !!
Thank you for your comments. I hope you get a high CTR using these tips. Stay connected with TechWelkin!
A very useful post, I will surely keep these points in mind when I rearrange my ads next time. Thanks for the awesome information.
Thanks for the comment Jacob! I hope this article will help you in increasing your AdSense CTR. Stay tuned. Hope to hear more from you.
Nice post and simply amazing post, very very helpful for every bloggers.
Thank you for such as nice post.