I have a few different blogs, each with google ads on them, and most of them have an average Page Click Through Rate or “PCTR” of about .11% - Pretty crappy but just about what I’d expect considering the audience I target with most of these blogs; people like myself who don’t click on ads.
However, on one of my sites I have an astounding CTR for ads of 7.38% - an insanely high ratio in comparison. At this point you might be wondering if I wrote one of the numbers incorrectly. I didn’t.
Instead, one of my sites is super targeted to a specific topic. Sure, this blog is pretty much all about development but imagine, instead, if it were all about Arrays in Javascript. That’s how targeted that other site is. Thus it doesn’t get much traffic (not that this site does either) but what traffic it gets generates the lionshare (not much) of my google adsense revenue.
For simplicity sake I’ll call the money making site, SiteX.
Here are some more numbers; all based on the time period of Jan 1 - Oct 12 2010:
Site| Visits| Clicks| $$|
SiteX| 9,360| 711| $70.13
---|---|---|---
ThisSite| 64,773| 53| $18.32
diary blog| 35,891| 41| $14.87
All in all I make far more money on these sites than I thought I would even though I don’t make much at all really. 103.32 in 10.5 months is pretty sad really. But SiteX sure does make me wonder what I could do on occassion.
For instance, if I extrapolated those numbers to match this blog so that I had the 64,773 visits with a CTR of 7.38% - that would result in 4042 clicks and would, if the pay rate were the same as on the SiteX blog, result in me being paid $398. Sill not much really but a heck of a lot more than I’m making now.
Plus, my traffic is, let’s face it, pretty anemic. Imagine what sites like Coding Horror pull in in terms of traffic; he probably has more visitors to each post than I do to this entire site each year. Imagine if I had the 64,773 visitors per post - I’ve made 18 posts (including this one) this year, if the CTR were the same I’d have made $7164 this year just from blogging - that would be a really nice auxiliary income.
Now I just have to find out how to get that kind of traffic and that kind of CTR. I’m pretty sure SiteX isn’t going to do it for me.