Which visitors will click your ads and which ones won't

By Kevin Duffey

When monetizing your blog or website, it's important to understand which web visitors will click your advertisements and which ones will not. Knowing the performance of the various visitors types, especially when it comes to ads, is crucial knowledge as a web business owner or operator.

How to find out who is clicking your Ads

The best part about Google's services such as Adsense and Analytics is that they work together (note: you can also integrate Adwords with your Analytics account). You can integrate your Analytics to show visitor and traffic data with regards to your Adsense performance. The setup is easy and only takes a few quick steps. Once you do that you can see who is clicking your ads and who isn't.

What you're likely to see

Once you integrate Adsense and Analytics, you will most likely see that your organic search traffic are the visitors that are actually clicking your advertisements. Why is that? I believe this is because of the following reasons:

1. Repeat visitors (non search traffic) are likely to already have trained eyes when it comes to your layout and content. This means that they are trained to not see your advertisements, and as a result, not click them. For the same reason, your readers almost never click on ads while reading your RSS Feeds.
2. Search traffic visitors are looking for answers and are likely to click on an ad (and leave your page) if they think it will get them closer to the answer to the question for which they originally searched.

Why do you need repeat visitors then?

If we're not monetizing our repeat traffic then do we even need them? Yes, we do. First, there are other monetization methods; for example, affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is likely to do better with repeat traffic, because these visitors are much more likely to trust you and your recommendations.

Also, repeat visitors helps build your website or blog brand as well as build your general traffic data which is important for other web rankings and metrics (Alexa).

Conclusion

To conclude, both repeat traffic and one-time search hits are important to your blog. When it comes to ads, it's rare (but not impossible) that your repeat visitors will be the ones helping you earn money through Adsense, but your repeat visitors are valuable for other reasons.

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