Significant drop in CTR on text ads this month

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Significant drop in CTR on text ads this month

avalon37

2:23 pm on Oct 25, 2013 (gmt 0)

Anyone else seeing this? CTR on text ads has been pretty steady the last couple of months, but October has seen a text ad CTR decline of over 25%. Pretty much every day this month has been consistently down the 25% CTR. Guess it's all the new ads text formats Google has been testing. Anyone else seeing a significant text ad CTR dip?

hannamyluv

2:52 pm on Oct 25, 2013 (gmt 0)

I did. But during a cross browser test for other changes on the site, we had found that a version of AdSense we were testing was causing the JS on the site to fail catastrophically in a few browsers.

Once we changed the AdSense code, CTR (and EPM) returned to normal.

It may or not be the case with your site, but worth a running it through a cross browser tester (for both PC and mobile) to see if this may be an issue on your site.

matbennett

2:55 pm on Oct 25, 2013 (gmt 0)

Across my accounts I am either seeing CTRs roughly the same, or in some cases noticeably up. Nothing noticeably down (touch wood).

deanw

7:52 pm on Nov 7, 2013 (gmt 0)

I too have seen more than a 50% CTR drop since October 27th. When I dig a little deeper I can see that the CTR drop is only with my Desktop platform. High end mobile and Tablets are performing as normal.

Could this be a JS issue as well?

indyank

3:04 am on Nov 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

@hannamyluv What is this JS issue that you are talking about?Can you pls. give more information...

1) Which version of AdSense was causing this?
2) What do you mean by version?
3) Which JS (is it the adsense code?) was falling and on what browsers?
4) What changes you did to bring it back to normal?

greatstart

7:19 pm on Nov 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

My CTR is nearly half of what it was one year ago. I do not like these new ad formats. I wish they would go back to what they used to use that worked. Don't mess with something that ain't broke!

indyank

7:10 am on Nov 10, 2013 (gmt 0)

For text ads,they seem to be experimenting with underlines removed for titles and that I guess is playing havoc.But their SERPS and premium publishers continue to retain the old text ad format!