Page Impressions and Click Through

If you are new to Adsense it can be confusing at first trying to understand all the different terms that are used to describe things. It also takes time to understand what are the important things that you should be checking. In this post I want to say a little about page Page impressions and Click Through rate.

Whether you are just relying on your adsense reports to monitor your traffic or also using some form of logging software you will want to know about page impressions. This tells you how many times the page with your adsense ads has been loaded. Easy eh?

Now remember that each visitor may read one page or a few so you will also want to know how many unique visitors you have had. And if you know the number of page loads and the number of unique visitors then you know on average how many pages each visitor is reading. This helps you to understand if visitors are interested enough to explore your site looking for more information.

Click through rate tells you what percentage of your visitors clicked through on your ads. This is a very important measurement.

Consider two different sites lets call them Site A and Site B. I will make these examples simple to illustrate my point.

Site A - this site gets 1000 page impressions a week and has a click through rate of 1%
How many clicks do they get? 10 clicks.

Site B - this site gets 100 page impressions a week and has a click through rate of 10%
How many clicks? 10 clicks.

Now if both sites are earning roughly the same money per click then both sites earn the same amount of money but site B is earning this with only 10% of the page traffic!

Of course what you really want is to have site A's page impressions and site B's CRT! That would give you 100 clicks and ten times the earnings ( assuming you were earning the same per click.)

So keep an eye on your click through rate. use some of the advice on this site and make sure you have good relevant content. In later posts I will discuss what strategies you can use it improve your CTR.

Notes: New Adsense users often get overly concerned about variation in their CTR ( Click through rate) and in the CPM ( cost per thousand impressions) figures. It may be helpful to clarify a few points about this to save you some sleepless nights.

CTR
Variations in the CTR are quite normal. In particular the lower your number page impressions the more wildly your click through rate will vary from day to day. This is largely due to random fluctuations and is not a cause for concern. As you gain more visitors and more page impressions your click through rate will still vary but probably not over as great a range. If you are getting a CTR of 10 - 15% over a period of time this is a good result. A CTR less than this may indicate that you still have room to better optimize and target your site. But remember - dont make this judgment on the CTR for a day or two - measure it over at least a week AND with a reasonable number of page impressions.

CPM
The Cost per thousand impressions is another figure that new users get more worried about than is necessary. This is a guide figure only and gives an estimate of the payment per thousand impressions. It too can vary over time. Concentrate on the quality and targeting of your content and don't fret about this figure. Some of the Ads that Google serves you will be site targeted and will pay you by CPM. The earnings per page impression tend to be very low and for small numbers of page impressions the earnings are so small that they don't show up on your Adsense report. Don't worry though - they are being credited to you and will show up as additional small amounts on your earnings.

In summary - Pay attention to CTR over time because for most Adsense users Ad clicks will be your main source of earnings. Pay attention to the way you construct your content and make sure you optimize it. Make sure you optimize your ad placement , types and visualisation.