In this article, I am going to review some information on the potential of AdSense income, list some benchmarks from various sites, and give basic optimization tips.
How to earn money with AdSense
AdSense is an ad network belonging to Google. It is the
biggest ad network in the world and the main service through which Google can
display ads on a lot of websites. The secret behind AdSense is its simplicity.
As a website owner you just need to sign into your account, create your first
ad, and insert the source code on your website. The last one is the trickiest
part for non-technical publishers, but still a lot easier than what some other
ad networks ask you to do.
At the beginning there was just one way of getting paid with
AdSense and this was on a per click basis. This means that you earn money each
time a visitor to your site clicks on an ad. It doesn’t matter what he did
afterwards on the target website. But before you start thinking about it: When
Google figured out that some people tried to raise their payments by clicking
on the ads on their own sites, they started penalizing for such behaviour.
68% of the click price
How did Google AdSense determine the amount you receive per
click? Google also runs AdWords, which is kind of a
mirrored service to AdSense. On AdWords advertisers running shops, services, or
other marketers create ads and tell Google to publish them on either the Google
search engine or in the display network, so all websites belonging
to the AdSense network. 68 percent of the amount an advertiser pays per click
on their ads on your site is your income. The rest is Google’s commission fee.
This still isn’t all you need to know about how much AdSense
pays you. The costs per click are calculated in an auction. Every ad that is
somehow in the pool to potentially be displayed on your website takes part in
it. In this auction, it isn’t just the highest bidder that wins, but the winner
is also determined by his “quality”. Without going deeper at this moment just
remember that Google will ultimately run some smart algorithms that try to get
the highest income per thousand impressions (return per mille = RPM) for you
(and them).
CPC, CPM, CPE
In addition to the cost-per-click (CPC) model, there are two
other bid types. Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) is an income model where
advertisers pay you a fixed price per thousand ad impressions. No click on them
is necessary for you to earn something from AdSense. This bid type only works
if advertisers choose on AdWords that ads should be displayed only on your
website. Before they can do that you need to ad custom channels. I might cover
this in an upcoming article, so you might want to subscribe to the newsletter
so as not to miss it.
The most recent bid type is cost-per-engagement (CPE). In
this case the advertiser is defining an action the visitor needs to fulfill
like expanding the ad, watch a video ad, finishing a poll, etc. This form is so
new that the documentation from AdSense doesn’t even mention it. As much as I
would like to increase income from AdSense, we will have to see how visitors
react to this, because the new engaging ad units might be a bit more jarring
than the classical text or image banners.
Which is the best bid type?
You are not able to select the bid type yourself. Google
calculates the best income when combining them based on what runs best on your
website. If advertisers know about your good reputation and book CPM campaigns
on your website, they might outrank your CPC income. If your CPC banners are
well placed and your content is written for valuable topics like finances, your
CPC might be unreachable. Lets see how the new CPE ad types kick in. The first
AdSense accounts I have seen them in look very promising.
Should I use AdSense?
Once the ad code is inserted in your site, you are ready to
earn money with AdSense. In practise, there is just one little problem for most
small websites: to earn money with any kind of ad type you need traffic on your
website.
This is the point where I normally stop new publishers who
ask me for consulting. You are just building your content and reputation, have
to fight for every newsletter subscription and the absolute traffic is below
10.000 pageviews a month. In this situation, you should consider waiting with
ads on your website. They might not only drive potential visitors away, but you
also need time to manage and optimize your
ads. Are there exceptions? Yes, there are. You will know when you see
one.
Some website owners explain their banners in terms of their
costs for hosting and the domain. I personally consider both to be so cheap
nowadays that any hour practically worked for free on your project costs you
much more than those things. If you don’t need those extra few cents per hour
wait with AdSense or any other ad network until your website has grown
significantly.
How much can I earn with AdSense?
The answer to how much AdSense finally pays you depends on many variables. Still, the most important is the content on your website. Still, this is not a very specific answer to your question. Neither Google nor most publishers like to publish numbers on how much they earn with AdSense.
$0,25 – $3 RPM for unspecific, generic content
When you are running a forum, social network or directory of
non-business information, chances are your AdSense income might not jump over
$3 per 1000 page impressions. This is due to either ad blindness of returning
visitors or information, that isn’t connected with products and won’t attract
visitors eager to buy anything. Even affiliate programs might not really work
here.
$1 – $10 RPM for content-rich sites, e.g. blogs
Content-rich sites like blogs should perform better with
AdSense. How much AdSense pays does still depend on your niche and how you
implement the ads, but a high frequency of new visitors and placement close to
the main content will lead to a decent income. If you have a higher amount of
traffic you might want to try other ad networks, affiliate programs and split tests.
$10 to a lot more for product-related sites
This is no surprise. If you are running a product-related
website, like a blog about products and services, review products or a business
directory, your income from AdSense, but also other sources should be the
highest. But don’t think you are the first to have this idea
What to do now?
Many of you might now be thinking of leaving your current hobby blog and starting a website with product information to earn more money from AdSense. Stop for a minute and rethink your monetization strategy. Maybe it is just AdSense that doesn’t fit you and your content. Or maybe you should check your banner performance and can earn more by using my basic optimization tips. Still, the numbers I mentioned are in such a wide range that I would love to read your comments about your AdSense income to either prove me right or wrong.
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