Increase your minisite’s CTR

October 11, 2009

CTR click through rate Click through rate (CTR) is basically the number of clicks divided by the number of page impressions. CTR is a very popular topic not only to domainers but also to website owners or bloggers. You could place all the ads in the world and get the highest traffic, but earn a very small amount compared to normal websites. So what’s your minisite’s CTR?…

… If you’re serving PPC ads in your minisites, CTR is something that you have to really understand and focus on.Your goal is to really increase the number of clicks with your visitors, and the best way for that to happen is thru playing around with ads.

Ads are tricky, place it at the wrong place, nobody or a few people will click. For me, the two best ways of increasing a minisite’s CTR is thru Ad design and Ad placements.

Ad Design

In my experience, Ad design play a big role, from the size all the way to the color. As for the size, I recommend that we refrain from the long skyscrapers, use boxes (336×280, 300×250, 250×250 etc.). I noticed that boxes look nicer and gets more attention. Blend the color, font size, font style etc. to your minisite’s design, make it without border (by blending) and same color with your links and text. Ads should be able to blend like as if it was a normal link in your minisite.

Ad Placement

Even if your Ads look great, it still doesn’t guarantee a click unless it was somewhere visible to your visitors. What’s important is that it’s placed in the ‘hot spots’ where visitors notice them straight away.

ad placement

Google has released a diagram to show which ones these are. The experience I had is that the best placement of ads are with the content, wrapping it around the content makes people click (or accidentally click) your ads. I usually wrap 1 or 2 ads around my contents. Another placement is on the sidebar or navigation of your minisite, placing ‘link ads’, make it look like your actual minisite navigation. This is perfect for minisites that doesn’t have too much external links, as it will be the only way out by the visitor.

So what should your target CTR be?

CTR = 1% is not good
CTR = 1-2% is ok.
CTR = 2% or more is great.
CTR = 4% or more is Excellent

My minisites average at around 2.70% CTR, which I thought was crap at first. But considering that It’s still picking up more visitors and tweaking of the ad placements, I’m expecting an increase to at least 3%. CTR’s are one of the trickiest yet most powerful when used right.

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