20% is a very high ctr, maybe that's what raised a flag for the adsense staff.

You should know that it's normal to have high ctr early in the day, then it gets lower.

Don't worry it's not that high. My ctr has been higher since I optimised and all has been ok (so far)

[edited by: Scurramunga at 8:29 am (utc) on Aug. 10, 2006]

It dropped back down to what I usually get, yes I am happy!

"
It dropped back down to what I usually get, yes I am happy! "

You got your priorities right?

If I had a high CTR , I would look at the causes and try to maintain it...

I've had high CTR in the past like that (15% plus), but I cut down on the number of ads due to the smartpricing effect. I did all the blending and non-bordering only to find out I may have been hurting myself.

I personally think that RandomPricing(tm) doesn't like sharp changes in ctr - it likes stability. Therefore I'd go for trying to stabilise the ctr on the site at whatever the natural rate is. That rate could be high, or it could be low - change is what causes RandomPricing(tm) to have kittens and drop your epc.

Remember that RandomPricing(tm) is purely unscientific. It's done by a guy waving seaweed round his head in the Google car park once a day and thinking of random numbers. Look up the Google campus on Google earth - you can actually see the guy :).

Oh - and then try to get Google earth to find America. It can't! You get directed to a spot of water somewhere off the west coast.

Do the kittens pop out of the servers?

Then they must be compucats.

Where is that drummer?

(Disclaimer: 3 glasses of wine)

[edited by: Khensu at 6:25 am (utc) on Aug. 11, 2006]

My CTR is 18%. I'm getting worried as well.

One of my websites gets from 17 tot 26.... I don't think it's that abnormal for specific niches or kinds of websites....

My CTR is 18%.

Out of how many impressions?

I have one site that averages a 19% CTR each month, there's a rectangular box with four ads on each page. Should I be doing something to make my CTR go down?

Its a niche site for a particular type of widget, at one point widgets were sold on it but the business folded. We left all the content and products up, but took the e-commerce system down and added a block of ads to the top of each page.

try to make your click through rates go down?

are you people on crack

I wish i could sustain a 20% click through rate, it took me like a year to get to 9%

are you people on crack

Thanks for the chuckle Warth0g!

Mines hovering at 16% - 20% today as well. Don't sweat it. It happens. And as mentioned above, by the end of the night, it will have most likely leveled off anyways.

Now put the crack pipe down and relax

I wish i could sustain a 20% click through rate

Harder than it seems however I do have one site that has averaged more than 27% for all of this YEAR so far and another with just over 23%.

Tis a pity that they don't get 1,000 clicks a day!

crack?

If I had 20% CTR I could spend every day in the VIP room and get what ever inebriants I wanted.

I think the general average is 5% which is what I have and I quit my day job on that.

Opti,

How am I ever going to beat you with 1897 posts?

I am going to have to get cracking here!

[edited by: Khensu at 3:02 pm (utc) on Aug. 16, 2006]

I have one channel that has averaged over 30% CTR since it's inception and it scared me too at first. I kept thinking I was going to get shut down for it any moment but I also thought the site would pass a manual review so I just let it keep going.

I have other channels with very low traffic but extremely high CTR's Whenever I have done things to try to drive more traffic to them the CTR invariably went down. I think in these cases the content happens to be just right for a very narrow set of visitors and if I do anything artificial to increase the size of that set the results are not as good.

My all time average CTR is about 2.5% and the trend for my sites is the more traffic a channel has the lower the click rate.

I think in these cases the content happens to be just right for a very narrow set of visitors and if I do anything artificial to increase the size of that set the results are not as good.

I totally concur. My specialist construction products have a specific market segment interest, my smaller, country specific (UK) sites have the highest CTRs whereas the generic, global sites vary from 4-15% depending whether it is for general informational sources and links through to the more international supply of my, and my competitors(!), construction products.

50% ctr would be bad, but 15-25CTR really is nothing to worry about, and adsense adjusts its pricing so you may be better off sometimes with lowr ctr (depending on traffic of course).