Is high ctr a thing to be concerned?

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Is high ctr a thing to be concerned?

Having a ctr above 3 for a couple of weeks.

immrrobot

11:46 am on Aug 4, 2021 (gmt 0)

My site is having a ctr of 3-4% for a couple of weeks now. My invalid traffic has rarely been above 1% July invalid traffic is around 0.5%

90% Traffic comes from US. I have been closely monitoring it. Traffic has remained kind of same over few months but CTR has hiked from 2.5% to 3-4%

Is that something to worry?

matbennett

11:36 am on Aug 5, 2021 (gmt 0)

I'd definitely urge caution. 2.5% is already high. That doesn't mean something IS wrong, but high CTR definitely correlates very closely with issues (and later - account deductions and/or policy problems).

A few questions to ask yourself:
* Does the increase coincide with any changes
* Are CTRs particularly high for any GEO
* Are CTRs particularly high for any device or device category
* Which placements are causing issues. Any chance of accidental clicks?
* Does your set-up let you see if any particular pages are causing issues?
* Does your set-up let you see if the high CTRs are coming from any particular traffic sources?

immrrobot

12:52 pm on Aug 5, 2021 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the reply Mat. Actually 2-3% is quite a norm in my niche. It's entertainment niche so usually users click more I guess than in niches like Tech. Let me answer few of your questions for clarity.

1. I update my content constantly to keep it relevant. So yeah that can be an issue.
2. High CTRs are more prominent from US traffic. 4.2% to be precise.
3. 80% of my traffic comes from mobile devices and it always has been that way so no changes seem to be there.
4. Every ad types and placements seem to have similar sort of revenue before a week. It's just CTR has pumped up.
5. 95% of my traffic has always been organic traffic. And that seems to be the case (as per Google Analytics)

Dimitri

9:54 am on Aug 9, 2021 (gmt 0)

Is it the CTR on display ads?

Because if you use vignette, and anchor ads, those can have a LOT higher CTR than the average, especially vignette ads, which are (supposedly) showing to a limited number of visitors, but highly targeted.

immrrobot

6:52 am on Aug 10, 2021 (gmt 0)

@Dimitri Yep have all of them on. To be honest I started seeing growth in my RPM and CTR after I started using auto ads, vignette, and anchor ads. A year back I used to get around 3-4$ in RPM. Traffic have somehow been same between 80k-100k per month. For 4-5 months my CTR was around 2-3% which I found quite normal because of the niche i'm in and ofcourse they were 95% organic.

But suddenly the CTR has popped around 3-4% but everything is sort of same. This made me question if I'm at risk or what?