Now that you understand the basics of navigating the AdSense revenue reporting mechanism, it’s time to consider what the numbers reported mean and how you can get increased value out of the reporting.
It’s quite appropriate that the Ad Performance statistics should be the first thing you see in the AdSense application, because as an AdSense publisher, you need to keep a close watch on these statistics. This chapter goes into the details of slicing and dicing the information you can get from the Report screen, but let’s start with the mile-high view first.
The most important statistic for you to pay attention to is the CTR, or click-through rate. CTR measures the percentage of times visitors click, and can be broken down on the basis of what is being clicked into Page CTR (page percentage click-through rate), Ad Unit CTR (ad unit percentage click-through rate), and Ad CTR (the percentage of times an individual ad is clicked). Page CTR tells you how effective your pages are as hosts for advertising, and Ad and Ad Unit CTR tell you how well specific ads and ad configurations work.
Page CTR should be in the 0.5 percent to 2 percent range (meaning that an ad is clicked from 1 to 4 out of every 200 times a page is displayed). As you’ll see when you learn about the AdWords program in Chapter 10, a 2 percent Ad CTR is a home run; it’s more normal to expect something slightly below 1 percent.
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Click-through rates are higher for ads displayed on Google search results pages than they are on web content pages, perhaps because it is easier to serve really relevant ads when people are searching for something specific rather than simply surfing web pages.
If your Ad CTR is consistently below 0.5 percent for more than a day or two—as those shown in Figure 9-7 are—meaning fewer than 1 in 200 ads are clicked, then you need to take remedial action because your traffic is going to waste.
Most likely, the problem is that Google is not able to accurately serve relevant ads on your pages because you haven’t written the pages to clearly present the most important content they contain (see Chapter 4 for information about how to fix this). Try tweaking your pages to emphasize their significant content areas. In addition, try changing the position of the AdSense ad units on your page, the kind of ad units, and the graphic schemes used in these ad units (see Chapter 8 for information about changing ad units and their palettes). It’s also worth seeing what happens when you change the number of ads and ad units per page. Carefully monitor the Reports tab to see which of these measures improves your CTR.
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You should also be monitoring your comparative performance. Over time—using fairly broad time slices such as weeks or months—is the absolute number of impressions going up (or down)? And what about CTR? If either the number of impressions or your CTR is declining, you should be concerned and consider revisiting your ad layouts and site content and positioning.