Does the Content Network Affect CTR?

Definitions

Click-through rates refer to the percentage of visitors to a page who click on your ad. For example, if 2 out of 100 people who visit a Web page click on your ad, your CTR is 2 percent. Because the rate changes so much from ad to ad, you need to test all your ads individually to see which ones get the better click-through rates. However, Google does recommend 1 percent as a reasonable starting goal.Content networks are groups of website owners who publish ads that are provided by the network owner. The website owners place a special code in their Web pages to serve these ads. Examples include Google AdSense, AOL Advertising and Chitika.

Importance

Getting a high click-through rate can be important in some situations. For example, Google uses CTR as one factor in your Quality Score, which can increase your number of ads while lowering the cost per click. CTR is particularly important if you are paying by the impression instead of by the click. This is because you are paying for your ads no matter how seldom someone clicks on them.

Ad Placement

Compared to search-engine advertising, several factors could reduce the CTR on content networks. The first factor is ad placement. Search-engine ads that appear in search results generally appear near the top or on the side of the results. Conversely, website owners in content networks can place their ads almost anywhere on the page. Some publishers even place their ads at the bottom. Because many surfers never even see these ads, such placement negatively affects CTR. In addition, different networks can produce different CTR rates because they have a different group of publishers.

Keyword Targeting

When advertising in search engines, you select which keywords to bid on and can track which keywords are getting the best CTR. With content networks, you are typically at the mercy of the ad-serving technology. This means that sites producing a low CTR will continue to show your ads despite the poor performance. However, services such as Google allow you to select your desired ad placement and other options when using the content network. By testing these options, you can attempt to reduce the negative effects on click-through rates.

Warnings

The conversion rate is also important to your bottom line. For example, if you pay $1 per click, you would have to sell one $100 item every 100 visitors to break even. That is just your gross sales, so you have to consider other expenses. According to a Google study, the average conversion rate on its content network was lower than search-engine conversions by about 28 percent. However, in the case of Google, that number was offset by a similar decrease in costs per click for network ads.