I have noticed a lot of talk lately on setting up an AdWords account that when clicked takes the user to a site primarily for the purpose of AdSense Ads (income).

I'm interested in knowing how many people click the ads, or if you just hit the back button?

If they're relevant, I'll click them - and I suspect that'd be the pattern with most people.

Read through the adwords/adsense forums, there's a lot of talk about MFA sites - I remember working it out mathematically a few days ago, it's on the forum somewhere.

In short, I don't think enough people find the ads relevant enough. To add to your problems, Google are cutting down on this sort of site...

Usually if I click an ad and it takes me to an MFA site I'm leaving. Google is also working on keeping those kind of sties out of AdWords so their days may be numbered.

Very rarely do i click adverts, I believe organic searches are more likely to give me what i want over someone paying for clicks. but if i was to click an advert and i landed on a site that wanted me to click more adverts I'll do the same as Van, I'll leave.

See I do the same thing... I don't understand why people do this, okay, maybe you can make some money at it if it is done right, but really there are a lot of things you can make money at, but ultimately just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Harvey, I'm just curious how many people actually click. I am not considering doing this?

I don't think I've ever actually reached an MFA site by clicking on ads, the only times I have were through a search, and in those cases I just leave.

One thing to keep in mind is we're generally high on the technical side here. As a group we don't click as often on text link ads as the general population. probably becasuse it's easier for us to recognize them as ads and not simple links to other pages on the site.

The general public might see some MFA sites the same way we might see links in a directory or even just a list of summaries of blog posts.

Sadly part of the trick of making money with AdSense is to make your visitors believe the links aren't ads, but part of the site or page navigation.

Good point, I didn't really think about it like that.

Yep. I think it's why a lot of us here probably don't have great click throughs. Any of us who write on a topic that's technical in nature get's typical visitors who are generally not add clickers.

When you think of most of the strategies for improving CTR a lot revolve around making the ads blend into the the rest of the pages so they don't look like ads. I have a hunch a lot of clicks are from people who don't realize they're ads.

Yea, tricking people's "banner blindness." I'd have to say that I think google's text/link ads that are in a row would work the best. I haven't tried that myself, but I imagine if you had them underneath your site's header people might think that they were navigation links.

I think that's exactly why they do work. You place them where you would navigation and they look like just that. There's also the idea of placing images near the links. In some respects the images will simply draw your attention to the ads, but the way most people have them set up the do look like they go with the ads.

I've seen sites where people made naviagtion looking icons and placed them next to the links.

Yea, last week sometime I actually ALMOST clicked an ad, before noticing it