MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I have to admit that I am both baf­fled and shocked by the data I am going to share with you.  On June 1st, 2007 Google started to roll out their “Place­ment Reports” that give every AdWords adver­tiser an inside look into Google’s con­tent ad network. 

With Google’s new Place­ment Report you can take a detailed look under the hood to see just exactly what domains your ads are appear­ing on and more importantly, you can now track the click-through-rate by domain and via Google’s Site Exclu­sion tool you can exclude all of the under­per­form­ing sites to opti­mize your ROI for Google’s con­tent ads.

How­ever, what is even more shock­ing is that a lot of the data that Google reveals just does not make any sense. 

I can only come up with two expla­na­tions, both would be shocking:

• Either the data that Google is show­ing is wrong and misleading
• Or the data is demon­strat­ing that there is mas­sive click-fraud across Google’s con­tent network

Let me present to you what I have discovered:

Obser­va­tion 1: The aver­age click-through-rate of Google AdSense ads tends to be between 0.25–5.0% per page. 

We run sev­eral blogs and sites such as www.blinklist.com and we are a heavy user of Google AdSense and this is the nor­mal click-through-rate that we have expe­ri­enced.  Please note that this is the click-through-rate for ALL Google AdSense ads.  Assum­ing at lest 1 major ad block with 4 ads, the click-through-rate per ad (adver­tiser) would be a frac­tion of the above. 

NOTE: There are most cer­tainly blog­gers and espe­cially made for AdSense sites that get a higher click-through-rate but for high qual­ity con­tent sites the above stats should hold.

So, on Google’s Place­ment Reports, I would expect to see a click-through-rate between 0.00 — 1.00% for most of the domains.  Granted, once in a while I might see a CTR of 100% if there was only 1 impres­sion and that user hap­pened to click on my ad but that should be the excep­tion and not the norm.

How­ever, please take a look at the actual dis­tri­b­u­tion and click-through-rate that I noticed (see image below)

This states that:

• The click-through-rate of our ads was 100% on 19.7% of the domains.  In other words, on 425 of 2,159 domains that our ads appeared on the click-through-rate was 100%!
• On another 11.6% of all the domains that our ads appeared on, the CTR of our ads was over 50%!
• Only 20% of the domains had a CTRof 20%

The above data is just out­ra­geous!  How can the CTR be 100% on 425 domains and 0% on 433 domains?  That just does not add up. 

True, for the domains where our CTR was 100%, we only got about 1 impres­sion but that is besides the point.  The point is that it should be vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to have as many domains with a CTR of 100% as one with 0%.  Why?  Because the aver­age click-through-rate of Google AdSense ads is only about 0.25–5% per page for all advertisers! 

On Google’s defense, the con­ver­sion rate of the ads where our CTR was above 10% was still very good but I still can­not make sense of the data.  The only other expla­na­tion I have is that Google does not want to reveal who is using its con­tent net­work and so it is not show­ing all of the other domains where our ads appeared on and our click-through-rate was 0%.

What are your thoughts?

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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