UK SEO and Internet Marketing Forums
Ad Click Through Rates on Your Sites

I'll give you my impressions of what is going on with two of my sites. These aren't tested but rough stats and some figures that are in my head.

Discount Shopping UK - By far the highest ctrs come from the text links. I tested a while back and found "Click here to visit ....." in big lettering providing the best ctr. Just had a quick count up (from the affiliate marketing companies) and the site's had 116 reported click outs on affiliate links from 410 uv's so far today (US day). About 25 of these are banner clicks, the rest are text clicks. So I'm getting around 20% CTR on the text links "click here"

Digital TV - First thing I'll say is that I've deliberately made it a "bit plastered in ads", the site gets some very targetted traffic from people looking to spend money on TV services.

Adsense (so far this month):
post page top    1,032 impressions    ctr    2.81%
sidebar top right    1,135    impressions    ctr    1.76%

The banners get clicked, but the majority of the sales for Sky Digital come from the text links and not the banners. The sales from Setanta, 1-3 per day, come from mainly banner ads.


I know it's not very scientific or accurate but it should give you an idea of what's going on with those two sites. But, like you, I get a higher CTR on text ads (discount shopping uk), I deliberately took the banners out of the post pages (it's WordPress) apart from a few selected top right banners... and at the end of the day it's all about those legitimate small, flat baked biscuits 

Thanks for the info.

One of the problems I have with that site is that someone on the sales team made a bad decision to commit to a bunch of long term banners on the home page and 2 other key pages. I can't stand the way it clutters the home page.

The site is a Joomla site, and sometimes makes it difficult to do some things that are easy to accomplish with a static site. But I did find a component that lets me create dummy modules that can hold the ads generated by our ad system and embed those ads in body text. That will allow me to get rid of some of the ads in the right and left columns. I may even eliminate one of the side columns on each page.

Iim also thinking about cutting down the height of the 3 blue modules at the top to increase visible ad space above the fold. But I really like the way those look and how they drive people to the key action points on the site. Sometimes it can be tough to strike a balance to what is best for our advertisers and what's best for our own interests. We have a content that we want to drive people to on the sitem and we have a new section going up with a few hundred more pages of important local info.

Thanks again for the info. If I remember, a month or two after I make the changes I'll post again and let everyone know if the changes made a difference.