AdSense CTR - What is the average click through rate?

I was asked many times by my customers whether they perform well with AdSense or not. The answer to their question is simple: if they have high CTR, they perform well, else they do not.

Since they have no reference, the problem appears when they ask what is the average CTR. Now this is a very hard question to answer. Why? Because it varies, it depends on too many factors.

Let’s think a bit and see what is the average CTR.

First, what are the factors which depends the CTR on? Not an exhaustive list, but the following factors:

1. Type of the website: regular presentation site, blog, online service, social network, etc.
2. Whether the website is content-rich and the content keyword-rich
3. Content industry. Is the content about medicine, IT&C, etc.
4. Visitors’ location (!)
5. Ad blending

If you don’t want to read all the explanations, click here for the answer, else read on.
Usually, blogs and social networking sites are the platforms on which the AdSense CTR is the lowest. I didn’t think yet about why, this is just my experience. Anyway, I think the blogs’ CTR is low because the age and culture of the visitors which visits the blogs and because many blogers think if they post a 3-4 lines it’s enough.
If you think a bit and have a good analytic subscription installed on your blog, you’ll know that most of the visitors are between 12-35-years-old, at least on the blogs I manage/managed. Most of them knows which links are AdSense ads and which are regular links. Most of them doesn’t think that clicking an ad supports the blog they visit, or they think clicking an ad “may harm their computer”. Yeah, you heard well. I encountered some juniors on a conference where I was talking about online-advertising, who really thought that *any* type of ad may harm their computer. We all know (or we should) that this is very untrue and the AdSense ads are less offensive than a snail in a glass.
On the other hand, social networks doesn’t perform well, because they have less content. Take Twitter as an example: you tell in a few words the world what are you doing at the moment. Is that content? I wouldn’t consider it content.
Of course, all the above doesn’t apply on all the blogs. Many blogs have incredible CTR, many have elder visitors. The above is just a general rule.

Websites other than blogs and social networks perform much better with AdSense. The type of visitors is much more different and usually they arrive on a particular website because they were searching for one specific thing. And here comes in the scene AdSense’s content matching technology. AdSense is very smart and provides ads very well matched to the content, the users finds the ad useful and will click on them because they are interested in the advert. A presentation site, a service has very clear content so the ad bot will serve ads which are extremely related to the content.

As a general rule of the thumb, a website has to have content to perform well with AdSense, if there is no content, the ad bot can’t serve ads (under content i mean text). But not all content is good. Let’s not forget that we want to show our visitors always ads which are very related to the content, and to achieve this, we have to use keywords in our articles and posts, they have to be keyword-rich. What am I talking about: for example if you write a review about a notebook, use many times the notebook’s type, manufacturer, and keywords related to the notebook, like the words “notebook, laptop, PC, hardware”, and so on.
Also, never forget that the ad bots can’t crawl *any* type of content. For example, if you publish comics on your website, the ad bot can’t crawl the text from the bubbles, thus will have no information about what to serve. Also, even if the Googlebot can crawl Flash based content, the Adsense bot can not! Well, this is not entirely true. Google announced today that from now on they will accept publishers who wants to publish AdSense ads in web based games, including games. Here’s the video example of how does this work:

If the ad bot can’t crawl the content, or has nothing to crawl, depending on how the publisher set his ad up, it will show either a solid color or public service ads which earns the publisher nothing. No ads equals no CTR.
Also, the industry is also very important. If you have content for example about “how to cure headaches” and if your visitors don’t find your content useful enough, they will click any link just to find a great cure for their headache, and in the same time increasing your CTR. Simple yet effective.

Another aspect is ad blending. Basically, when an ad block is blended with the content the CTR is way higher. For example, if the title of the ad looks like a link on your site, the background is the same as you site’s, your CTR will be higher.

Finally, the CTR depends on where are the visitors located. I was amazed like you, but this is very interesting. Who do you think are clicking the most? Which nation: Japan, Brasilia, China, USA? I tell you what: US visitors. 90% of the clicks I receive is from US visitors, and more than 80% of my traffic is from the United States.

So what is an average CTR? I’d say, if you have a blog or social network then 3-6%. On a presentation site or any regular website the CTR is around 9%.

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