If you have niche sites that are not getting much traffic it can be tempting to try to boost the traffic by stumbling, digging or adding your post or site to social network sites. However if you are monetising with Google adsense be careful. Google pays you for traffic that not only clicks on the adds but that converts. Not all the people who click on ads are going to buy of course but Google knows what proportion to expect to convert if the traffic is targeted.
That means that traffic coming to your site needs to be already looking to purchase something. You get this kind of traffic from the search engines. If someone is looking for an answer to their problems they will use a search engine to find it - they won’t use stumbleupon or blogcatalog! Stumblers and diggers are surfing, hopping from one site to the next. If they do happen to click on an ad they are very unlikely to buy anything. At least this kind of traffic is not too likely to actually click an ad. A lot of social traffic can lead to Adsense smart pricing
Quote from Googles Adsense Blog (my bolding)
The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site — advertisers don’t gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR. (ROI return on investment - CTR click through rate)
So Google wants targeted traffic. That means traffic from search engines that comes to your site with a purpose in mind. It is also important to have relevant content on your site to trigger relevant ads. This is easier with a niche site and you can tweak the ads appearing by making sure the relevant keywords are in your post titles and content. Use one post per page unless all your posts target the same keywords especially on the home page. Mixed posts targeting different keywords will only confuse the Google bot and lead to irrelevant ads which won’t do you any good.
How do you know if you’ve been smart priced?
All the sites in your account are affected not just the offending site and the cost per click (CPC) will go down to cents. If you see a sharp drop in CPC you could be smart priced. The good news is that if you remove ads from the problem site your CPC should return to normal in about a week or so as soon as Googlebot has reindexed your site. It may be difficult to find the offending site especially if you have more than one that is causing the problem. The CTR is an indication that the traffic is not targeted for the ads but itself is not a problem - you could have a low CTR but high conversion so use it as an indication not a proof that you may be smart priced.
Griz has lots more information at How to Get Traffic to your Website or Blog
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