I have a site based on helping people that’s been around since 1997. We’ve spent the past year testing every possible AdSense ad location and design to find the best performing units. We’ve also optimized pages to load nearly instantly, and have redesigned the entire layout to match Google’s best practices.
(It was A LOT of work. Whew!)
As a result of all this, our CTR has climbed from a .25 average to over 3% average. Today, we’re well over 5%. This worries me.
I met for a 1-to-1 meeting with a member of the AdSense team last month. They were very impressed with what we’d accomplished. However, I was told that, if the CTR goes over 5%, AdSense starts getting suspicious.
I notice that our CPC is dropping fast. I don’t want to undo the hard work that Google liked so much, but I also don’t want to get banned by the automated system.
Hopefully your account has been flagged under a manual review now that you’ve met with their team but hoping probably isn’t worth trusting
Call the rep you talked with, explain the spike, the efforts and ask them take a look from their end. Google wants great publishers [they make far better CPMs off of you then the RON publishers] but they also have to insure quality. Knowing that you’re working to improve things but also ready to respond to issues should be enough to at least have them warn you if there is a problem.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t given a way to directly contact the rep. My meeting was part of the AdSense In Your City tour.
Getting hold of anyone at Google is extremely difficult! (And that was one of my complaints to them at the meeting.)
I guess I’m just hoping for a manual review. The CTR has dropped a bit since I first posted, but is still above 5%. Maybe by the time the day closes out, it will have gone below 5%. Then I can breath a sigh of relief!
It’s strange that I have to worry about doing so well, but I understand why it might trigger the automated system.
