Adsense CTR Down - Thoughts on Layout Changes

[davidjoseph]

I recently moved my website over to wordpress and gave it a completely new design. My avg time on site has doubled, as well as my pages per visit. However, my Adsense CTR has dropped dramatically.

[Tom K.]

When you evaluate your traffic stats, are you going by your server stats (such as Webalyzer) or are you going by page impressions in the adsense interface?

[davidjoseph]

I am going based on the Adsense Interface column called "Page CTR"

[Gerry]

What was the site on prior to WP?

What was and what is your CTR?

How long has it been since the change?

Have you optimized the site well with keywords, metatags, and tags?

[Tom K.]

Anytime you build in Wordpress, your traffic will go up and as a result ctr will go down because the traffic is inflated due to the site appearing now on blog search engines. The new flow of traffic is not targeted while the amount of targeted traffic is about the same and so the resulting ctr is down. Also, if you are not careful in the redesign, the actual targeted traffic will go down. But if you seo'd it well then it will eventually go up again.

You also get a lot more spam traffic as spammers target WP sites trying to post comments.

In the end, if the content and seo is good then your site will start producing more click-thu's. Hope this clarifies it for you.

[davidjoseph]

This would make sense except that the traffic or new traffic all seems to be pretty well targeted since the bounce rate, avg time spent on the site and pages/visit have all increased... as well as a decent increase in the number of people signing up for my e-mails each day.

I was just wondering if maybe I should try using different colors for the adsense titles... or maybe different adsense units / shapes...

Doc Com - I have optimized all of the posts. I was using a home made system, but my wordpress sites always seemed to do better, hence the switch. My CTR before was 5-7% and now it is more in th 3-5% range.

[KING dot NET]

CTR for website in general is low. Though you can maximize your profit from advertisers that are interested in page views advertising.

[davidjoseph]

From everything I have read, CTR's are generally 5-7%, which is what the majority of my sites do...

[Gerry]

From everything I have read, CTR's are generally 5-7%, which is what the majority of my sites do...

The articles that I have read all point to 9% adsense CTR being the high side of the norm, which is low, imo.

I am happy to see in the 5%-6% CTR per month.

[KING dot NET]

If I see 2-3% CTR, I'm happy.