Not even the exception, in the best case something like 1-2% of users click adds on average. The median user won't interact with them, advertising isn't for the median user. It's also fair to say this topic is explicitly focused on ads, therefore on people who would click on ads.
An interesting piece of data they show is how often you click on Ads. I seem to do it about once a week, which I did not expect, as in my mind I almost never click on ads (although in a lot of those searches the Ad just leads to the actual site I'm searching for).
I often wonder how much better the click through rates are for Steam than the ad industry as a whole. I’d estimate that I typically click on at least 4-5 ads on the steam home page a week. I actively enjoy scrolling through them to see if there’s anything that looks interesting to me.
May I ask what percentage of your visitors clicks on ads? $5 per click isn't really worth much if no one clicks the ad, or is that constant throughout topics?
I would be grateful if you let us know in a couple of days (or enough time to get a decent data set?) how many people are using the feature (and if it has any noticeable effect on user behaviour), and what kind of clickthrough rates the ads have...
Not all ads need clicking, and the big budgets have never been in generating clicks, but in Branding (like TV ads).
The 10% that click are likely spit somewhere around 50-50 between the least valuable eyeballs (suckers who click ads) and people that actually are interested, depending upon the ad type (Search more valuable, banners less so).
Now I'm unsure if each individual click is actually billed for that much. Or if that's a sum / average of all the advertising costs until someone finally clicks.
Lots of users that are not you nor I click on ads. I should know, I used to run Instagram and Facebook ads for my product and my user acquisition cost on that was far lower than my average revenue per user. People absolutely click on ads and buy stuff.
1-5% click through rate on a display ad is pretty normal. If had impressions on 400k sites, the distribution of impressions per site had a long tail, and then you removed all of those that had no clicks, you'd expect to have a small set of placements with clicks. It doesn't mean they're spam sites, it's just math.
I agree that certain demographics are most likely to click than others. I myself rarely click on ads, and estimated that click through rates must be very low (1/1000). Yet, my sudoku game site routinely has CTR of 2-5%. No ad tricks, just a large and obvious ad. I can only imagine what CTR tricky ads get.
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