There can be many factors that may keep your visitors away from paying any attention to your Adsense ads. Let's discuss each one of them one by one.
Choosing A Wrong Niche
Sometimes publishers pick a wrong niche that inherently has no scope to perform well with Adsense. If you are writing about your garden, your dog and about your eating habits, how much traffic can you expect in the long run?
Choose a profitable blog niche and rest assured that half of the problem is already resolved. Sometimes choosing a popular niche alone does not solve the problem. Some popular niches have very tech-oriented and web-savvy audience who are familiar with PPC ads. They are simply blind to these advertisements and never click on them. For example, blogs on Internet marketing, SEO and blog tips normally receive knowledgeable crowd who are already familiar with these ads. On the other hand, large percentage of traffic on a weight loss blog is not aware about Adsense ads. The probability of clicks is much higher on a weight loss blog when compared to an Internet marketing blog.
Wrong Placement
Sometimes new publishers fail to place their ads at the best performing areas on their blog. Adsense has provided a heat map for publishers suggesting the best placements for their ads.
The red zone represents the best position for ad placement. This zone lies right in the middle of the page, above the fold just before the main content. The second best zones are highlighted in light brown color and the least profitable zones are highlighted in yellow color. Ads embedded around the main content are known to perform the best. Follow the placement suggestions given in this heat map to increase your CTR significantly.
Crazy Color Schemes
Take a look at the color scheme of a sample ad shown below. This dark color combination is definitely going to put strain on the eyes of most visitors.
Such color schemes normally repel the visitors and results in immediate bounce from the site. The enthusiasm and lack of experience contributes to generation of such color schemes by new Adsense publishers. I did it in my early days and found them damaging instead of giving me any clicks.
The best performing ads are gelled with the color scheme of the blog. Follow these simple guidelines to generate the best color combination for your ads.
1. Keep the ad background color, link color and the text color same as your blog's theme.
2. Use the Adsense latest custom fonts feature to closely resemble the ad unit same as your main content.
3. If you are embedding the ad right next to the main content, remove the border from the ad.
Sometimes, color blindness play a major role in reduced CTR. You can use the powerful palette rotation feature to deal with this situation. Recently, I've written an article about reducing ad blindness through palette rotation.
Not Using Large Ads
In many cases, a publisher uses small size ads that may fail to attract the attention of the visitors. Use large rectangle 336x280, medium rectangle 300x250 and wide skyscraper 160x600 to get the best results.
The combination of right color scheme and large ad size, supported by correct placement according to the heat map shown above, increases the probability of getting more clicks for your ads.
Displaying Less Ads
This is one more reason that may contribute to low CTR on your blog. Adsense allows up to three Adsense for content units, three link units, two search boxes and one Adsense for video unit on a single web page. So you have a total of nine ad units available for a single page of your blog. Having said that, one must keep in mind the negative implications of stuffing all these nine units on tightly packed page with relatively less content.
If your blog template is wide with good portion covered with your main content, you can experiment and choose the best combination (number of ads on a single page) for your blog.
Irrelevant Ads
Adsense ad delivery technology is very sophisticated supported by years of refinement to serve the most relevant ads on your blog. Still some publishers complain about getting irrelevant ads on their blog. What's the reason?
Well, this normally occurs when you try to blog about just anything under the sun. When a blog has no definite topic (no definite niche) and host content on wide number of topics some of which are totally irrelevant from each other, this phenomenon may occur. Narrow down your niche and post consistently about that topic to get the most relevant ads on your blog.
Dull Content
If you are experiencing low CTR, see the bounce rate of your blog. If it's alarmingly high (80% or above) you've found one of the reasons that are contributing to this low click-through rate. One of the primary factors responsible for high bounce rate is low quality content.
If large numbers of your visitors are not staying for long on your blog, the probability of clicks automatically reduces drastically. Write compelling content to give them a reason to stay longer on your blog. The more time they will spend in scanning the content, more will be the probability of getting clicks on your Adsense ads.
Less Organic Traffic
If large portion of your traffic is coming from social media sites or referral sites, you may observe low CTR with high bounce rate. Visitors coming from search engines are more likely to click on ads as they are genuinely looking for something, querying for something.
You cannot expect the increase in percentage of traffic from organic sources in a fortnight. It takes time to build an archive of quality content. As your blog archive will grow, traffic from organic sources will automatically increase bringing the kind of visitors you need.
Have Your Say
Have you ever experienced this phenomenon? If yes, what other steps you took to increase the CTR on your blog?
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