Adsense is considered to be one of the best way to earn additional income through your website or blog. As we know, Adsense is an advertisement program by Google which pays the publishers when someone clicks on the Adsense ads placed on the website. The chances of any visitor clicking on the ads on your website depends upon the traffic coming to your website. If your website is having a low traffic then the chances of the ads getting clicked are minimal and on the other hand if your site is having a huge traffic the chances of getting ads clicked are higher.
As a result all the website owners or webmasters tries all sorts of methods such as SEO, SEM and Social Media Optimization / marketing to bring traffic. As we know SEO is a slow process and SEM is an instant result generating process but is expensive. On the other hand Social Media sites are capable of generating huge traffic to your website and it is quite natural that webmasters expect an increase in the Adsense clicks due to huge social media traffic.
But the fact is that social media traffic has a much lower Click Through Ratio (CTR), when compared with traffic coming as a result of SEO or SEM. This has been a creating big disappointment to webmasters who had expected their adsense click and revenue to increase due to the enormous traffic from social networking, bookmarking or news websites. There are various reasons for the low Adsense click rates from social media traffic. But the major reason is that most of such traffic are not relevant traffic, i.e some one visits the site from any social media link and just skips it. In social media traffic, most of the time users are forced to land on a website that are not of much use and as a result visitors do not tend to stay much time on the webpage or website.
One more reason is that 95% of the active social media users are aware about Google Adsense or any other ads placed on the website. As a result they do not click on these ads even by accident. The chances of a active social media user hitting an Ad on any website is minimal unless he find the Ad too useful to him.
On the other hand the traffic from Search Engines as a result of SEO or SEM is supposed to produce more clicks on ads placed on any website. The basic reason is users that come from search engines are genuine searchers who might be searching for something over the net. Such users are more likely to clicks on Ad links which they feel similar to what they are searching for. A large number of users who come from search engines are not aware of the Ads that are placed on websites and they also end up clicking on these ads.
This doesn’t mean that social media traffic doesn’t bring any clicks, but minimal clicks. For example if a 1000 visits from a social media site produces 5 clicks on Ads placed on any website, these 5 clicks can easily be produced from 100 search engine visits.
great post, I totally agree with you, it is all bout relevancy which would be obvious to many sem guys as we know all too well it’s about the quality of traffic not volume.
Hello.I have one question. Isn’t it against google adsense TOS to have majority of clicks coming from social media traffic? I have an example when out of 8000 website visitors a day 3000 are clicking on adsense and majority of them are from Facebook. And moreover these are returning visitors and as a result they are generating duplicate clicks.