5 Reasons Your Visitors Aren’t Clicking on Your AdSense Ads

The reasons your visitors aren’t clicking on your AdSense ads could be many and varied. Here are five common factors that can cause searchers to ignore advertisements and your site’s content altogether.

Ads Don’t Target Blog Audience

Having a website dedicated to online gaming that serves AdSense ads for women’s shoes isn’t well targeted to its audience. Your visitors simply have no interest in those products, so they don’t click on the ads for them. Google automatically uses contextual detection tools to gauge your site’s potential audience based on its content. Adding content every week that’s consistent with your site’s niche can help Google serve ads with greater potential for clicks. 

Change Your Ad Settings: Google allows AdSense advertisers to use interest-based options for serving ads. Interest-based advertising gives you a more effective targeting option to serve ads that are more relevant to your site’s visitors.

Aggressive Keyword Targeting

This issue isn’t your fault, but you can still do something about it. Overzealous keyword targeting at the start of an advertiser’s campaign can also cause ineffective ad placement. The company thought adding as many keywords as possible would lead to more conversions, but it polluted your site with irrelevant ads, causing anemic click-through rates (CTR).

Trim Your Keywords: During the first 90 days of your campaign, trim your keywords through your Adsense Dashboard to block the keywords and advertisers that don’t match your visitor interests. As more relevant ads show on your website, you should begin to see improving impressions and click-through rates.

AdSense Blocked for Your Website

If you’re a first-time webmaster, you or your hosting team could have blocked the Google AdSense bot and not realized it. Because the bot can’t crawl your site, it can’t serve any ads, which is why no one can click on them. Check if you did this by accident by typing “www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt” into a web browser window. If you see “Disallow: Mediapartners-Google” on the page, you need to fix this issue to allow Google ads to run on your website.

How to Fix Robots.txt: You need file transfer protocol (FTP) access to your site to adjust or create a robots.txt file. Once you’re logged into the FTP, remove the offending lines from the robots.txt file and add “User-agent: Mediapartners-Google” to the file. Leave the “Disallow:” line right underneath the User-agent line blank, like this:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow:

Ads Show Below the Fold

Content displaying below the fold has dramatically lower interaction rates than what visitors see when your site first loads in their browser window. Once visitors start to scroll down your homepage, their engagement diminishes. If you have AdSense ads displaying below the fold, they’ll probably suffer from similar drag.

Re-position Your Ads: Move your ads so that they appear higher on your homepage, which should help improve the number of clicks they receive. If optimizing placement doesn’t result in higher CTR, you may want to cut the total number of ads displayed on your site or check ad targeting as mentioned earlier.

If you have more than 10k pageviews per month, Ezoic is a really helpful technology for all of this.

Low Organic Traffic to Your Website

A site with low monthly organic traffic likely doesn’t rank on the first page of Google results for key terms with strong search volume behind them. Without steady search engine traffic to fuel impressions, your AdSense ads won’t have enough opportunities to generate clicks. Improving Google rankings and increasing organic traffic won’t happen overnight, but it’s necessary to drive qualified searchers to your website and ads.

Create High-Quality Content: Set up a weekly blogging schedule to talk about emerging topics in your industry, business promotions, and advice leveraging your expertise. Produce content that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and promote that content through your social media channels. As your site begins to acquire authority in your industry, through organic links to your content, social mentions, and a variety of other factors, you should begin to see improvement in traffic and placement in organic search results.

Improving search engine traffic and optimizing ad placement on your site is part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Address these ad concerns with a multi-pronged approach, and you could see more clicks and added website revenue sooner than later.