The question does niche affect CPC was one that I asked myself after some comments I got from potential buyers on a site I was selling on Flippa.

To summarise, CPC is cost per click from advertising like Google adwords which is the amount you get each time an end user clicks one of your ads.

A couple of potential buyers of my site had said to me that they had analysed the CPC for the niche that my site related to, and that the CPC was very low – about $0.02.

So I got a bit despondent and thought that may be why, although the site had tons of traffic, maybe that was why I was not earning as much ad revenue as I thought I should. So I went to the site and had a look around and came to a different conclusion. All of the ads that I saw referred to stuff that I personally was interested in or had searched for recently. None of the ads related to the topic of the website.

I also went back over the time I had had the site (nearly 4 years) and checked out the CPC. It was way higher than the $0.02 that the buyers had told me was the going rate for that niche.

One question I don’t know the answer for is – do the advertisers bid a particular rate for their ad showing in a particular niche? – and if that is the case then the niche might well be relevant to the CPC. But if the answer is No then surely the niche does not have much effect on the CPC at all.

The key to the CPC rate therefore must surely be the type of ads that are shown to the viewers of the website and what kind of things they are interested in. So to that extent the niche may have a bit of influence on the CPC because let’s say your website is about high end finance, then your end users may well be interested in stuff that would generate a high CPC. But if your website could appeal to anyone (which mine would, albeit mostly women) then the ads could surely be from any niche?

I went in search of info about how to increase CPC and to be honest I got a lot of rubbish. Some of the advice firstly was to select a high end niche to base your blog/website on – well that’s not much good for those who already have a website to start with. But I wasn’t impressed with much of the rest of the stuff I read. More useful were some posts saying not to worry too much about CPC, but to instead concentrate on ad look and placement to increase CTR. This seemed like good advice to me, especially after I went back and checked the CTR and I found it to be pretty low. I made some changes to the site style and ad location, as well as the colour scheme of the ads and hey presto, an increase in CTR almost immediately!

So, does niche affect CPC? I would say only to a limited extent, depending on who you are targeting with your niche, but it is not eh be all and end all of increasing ad revenue on your website.