Traffic and Adsense Clicks, CTR.

[dan]

I consider adsense part of marketing. With that said, adsense is not my strong point but I have done quite a lot of research.

Recently, myself and four other webmasters have been participating in some self-discovery concerning website traffic.

The jest of our debate centered around bots and how they can drive up traffic that give misleading results. Some bots are useful (i.e. search engine bots) and some are not (bots that gather data for marketing). And then there are those bots that are down right dangerous by causing harm or at least effecting the performance of your site.

You can block most bots from crawling your site but of course you don't want to block the bots that are search engine spiders.

I'm sure most visitors notice I use Adsense on my site. In most cases the higher your traffic the more money you make through adsense.

During our bot story (study) I let the flood gates open and let all bots do their thing (except for the ones known to be dangerous). Of course traffic increased (understand that bots are not humans - they are programs created to crawl your site to gather info) but your logs don't know who is and who is not a human. During the time I open the flood gates, adsense CTR went down -- the question is, does your CTR have any effect with the revenue you receive per click?

Let me use some examples to explain.

1. Lets say your page CTR is 2.55% and your page impression is 10,000 pages which gives you about 255 clicks.

2. If your page impressions went up to 20,000 pages and your clicks stayed at 255, your CTR would be lower.

Since both #1 and #2 above have the same amount of clicks, is the revenue the same? NO! It seems it could be dramatically different.

From researching google and other sites, higher CTR is rewarded with higher payout per click. I'm going to post a big QUESTION MARK and ask others if they can verify this to be the case. Research is not plentiful yet it does seem to indicate this is the case.

If this is true, it is another reason why I would want to block out useless bots from creating artificial stats in my log. As I write this post, I block out several bots that have no use but to eat up my bandwidth and create artificial non-human traffic that does nothing for the bottom line.

Bottom line -- it may pay to know your bots.

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