[spocked]

A 1% CTR is quite normal for an adsense advert. Assuming your advert is a banner ad, it should have similar CTR.

It is important to understand that over time people develop banner blindness - your ad could have copy providing a lot of value, but the human brain would simply be ignoring it. I would suggest A/B testing with different types of ads, with different copy and call to actions.

One more suggestion is that you can build an email list. It might be slow at start, but over time as the list grows, you no longer have to depend on users coming to your website and clicking your ads. You can contact them directly in their inbox. Obviously don't spam them with useless emails - offer them something of value in every email and try to email them every month (or every week if you can). People also react differently to emails since they are more personal and if you build up trust, it should be a lot easier to get their attention.

[wishiknew]

My AdSense CTR is actually much better (3%-5%), that's what I don't understand. But I've just deployed a new version and I put some sexy unsplash.com images in my CTA and content. It's only been a few minutes but it's already looking much better. It still puzzles me how much you have to dress your content to make it attractive on the Internet, though. You could write articles in thirty seconds and get away with it as long as you put boobs and kitten pictures it seems.

[spocked]

Images work really well when the user is surfing in general and not looking for something in particular. That explains why images are very important for Facebook Ads, while keywords are very important for Google adwords (search).

The only way to know is to keep running A/B tests.

[wishiknew]

What puzzles me is that most of the articles I've written for this site are working quite well in terms of CTR, and I never did A/B testing for them. Right now I have two images on my home page linking to my lessons, one is a beach and the other is a crowded live concert (they're relevant to the lessons). 20% of the 1% who clicked on the beach image have spent some time learning the song, whereas my crowded venue image has about 0% CTR. Perhaps I could find a better image for the 2nd lesson, sure, but if 6 people are interested in the 1st lesson when it's free, how many will want to buy it? I feel I'm losing my time. PS: Would you want to help me by doing some consulting for me? I really need somebody to see if I'm doing something stupid.