One way to increase your online income is increase the click through ratio on your ads. There are a ton of information on ad placements, best performing ad formats, ad colors, etc.  All this information is relevant and can put a few extra bucks in your pocket, but there is something else that has more effect on CTR. As you can see on the image above (just made a screen shot, but it is pretty much the same day to day), the click through rates are completely different. While most show a small fraction of 1%, another one shows over 9% CTR.

What is the deal you may want to ask? Did I misplace some of the ads? No. As a matter of fact, the image above shows a few channels sorted from the ones making the most to the ones making the least income amount. The first channel shows 0.12% CTR and we tested ad placement forever on that site since we get a ton of traffic on it. This is pretty much the best it can do. Yet, the ad that shows 9.09% CTR is placed on relatively new site and we did not test the colors, formats or ad positions at all. Just through one out there and bam, a little under 10% every day now.

The main reason why you can see such a HUGE difference is because of the niche. We have always been building sites for the webmasters and seo people. Whether it is tools or services, all of these have CTR that is usually lower than 1-2%. After years of experimenting with ad positioning,colors and formats we gave up testing, there is no sense since webmasters are the most ad-blind users. Instead, we decided to give it a try for another niche. We created a website where the most visitors are regular people with no advanced knowledge of the web or how it works. Got some traffic, placed a banner and noticed a huge difference right away. Gave it a couple of weeks to test but the results are still the same.

If you are trying to maximize the income from existing sites by increasing the CTR, try repositioning ads, changing colors and formats. You will be able to gain a few more clicks in the end, but it doesn’t matter much if you are not getting a lot of traffic. If you see a low CTR, you are in the wrong niche for Adsense. Try something different, target regular people with no knowledge on how web works.

I have seen a few more interesting examples of high click through rate. Back when I worked in the custom software company, my coworker showed me his adsense account with almost 20% click through rate. I thought he was really good at ad placement before I took a look at his website. It was one of the ugliest and unstructured websites I have ever seen. I had no idea how to navigate through the site when I saw it and ads were the only things that were catching my attention. I do not recommend doing it however. He was happy, money was good, but he did not focus on loyal users and therefore his the income stayed the same forever. Meanwhile, I was improving one of my sites and went from 1,000 page views a day over 10,000. I started making way more with a lot lower CTR. Focus on positive user experience, keep google happy and build user loyalty.

So, if you have a good site, loyal visitors and good growth, low CTR would work in the long term. However, if you have built a website and get a lot of organic traffic but the visitors simply don’t like your service and never come back, don’t get discouraged. If you traffic is the same month after month, just make the website super ugly. Ads look a lot more attractive on an ugly site. You can also switch to pay per view ads and get paid for every 1000 impressions. Since webmasters don’t want to click on your ads, you can make them look at the ads for a few seconds before they can click “skip” if you want. Usually visitors get irritated with those and you may lose some, but if your service is truly useful and unique, they have nothing to complain about.

Back to the main point, I believe that your niche has more to do with CTR than anything else. No matter how appealing your ads are, people like me are ad-blind. Know your visitors and do your own research. As for me, regular internet users who have no knowledge of the web are the best ppc audience for me (preferably 4-17 and 50-90 year old).