WHAT IS CTR?

CTR is the "click through rate" - the ratio of users who click ads compared to the number of visitors.So if you had 100 visitors and each visitor clicked one ad (100 ad clicks), then your CTR would be 100%.

That is actually not that terrific because the chance that every visitor clicks an ad is pretty small.Having your CTR go up isn't necessarily bad in and of itself, what's bad is if the CTR is out of whack on a realistic level.

For example, although there isn't really any way to predict an average CTR for any site, most of the time we see rates that are around 1 to 5 clicks per 100 impressions. Some sites will show a higher click rate, some a lower one. Neither would be particularly bad unless the clicks to impressions rate is extremely high, like perhaps 250 clicks and only 100 impressions.You earn money when people click ads, so yes, we do want people to click on our ads, but we cannot ask them to, nor entice them to do that - not in any way.

We can't draw attention to the ads, we shouldn't mention the ads (not to family, not to friends, etc.) As publishers what we want is for people to click an ad (on their own) if they are interested in the product being advertised, but we simply can't say that. Basically, the safest and best thing to do is put the ads on your site and nothing more - don't mention them, don't point them out, don't write an article about them.

Valid clicks are those that meet all Adsense's requirements for validity (don't ask, because we honestly don't know what ALL the requirements are, but there is a link below that lists some that adsense has given us). Invalid clicks are a number of different factors (again, we don't know all of what goes into making it invalid) such as (more obvious ones) clicks from your own IP address and/or computer (an accidental click which will happen to all of us, at least once); asking for clicks; visitors clicking an ad but maybe not actually letting the advertiser's page load (in other words, they clicked an ad but either didn't realize it was an ad, or clicked it accidentally) - and other things we just don't really know.