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Starting out on the internet marketing journey Google's Adsense is one of the easiest ways to make money (monetize your site) from your website/blog. But when people start out I notice they aren't completely familiar with some of the intricacies of how it works, so I am going to do a quick breakdown.
Google's Adsense allows a user to put a piece of code on their website and display advertisements to earn revenue. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of the advertisements the publisher (owner of the website, YOU, the one who put Adsense up on the site), will get paid. Example of a 300x300 adsense advertisement:
The advertisements comes from advertisers who utilize Google Adwords and their "Display Network" for advertising their products/services. The "Display Network" is the group of publishers(websites) which display banner advertisements, textlinks, and other rich media on their websites for Google in exchange for revenue. Once you put up Adsense on your website and are approved you will now be consider a part of the display network.
Now you have to understand this is a zero sum game. If there are no advertisers there is no revenue for you. So if you create a website in a niche no advertiser is targeting or wants to target, you will get the bare minimum revenue, if any revenue at all.
When advertiser #1 uses Adwords to place a bid, this is an auction style system, on a keyword which your website targets, you will start seeing their advertisements on your website. When a user clicks on the advertisement you will get a percentage of the amount they bid.
Let's say they placed a $1 bid for a keyword one of your pages with Adsense is targeting. When a visitor on your website clicks the advertisement you will get for simplification 50% (The real amount is close to 68% - Source: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en). So in our example you'll get $0.50 out of the $1 bid.
Now let's say Advertiser #2 comes in and bids $2, but only on Weekends. When a visitor visits your website on weekdays, they'll see the first advertiser's ads, and if they click you'll get 0.50 revenue per click. However when a visitor visits on weekends, since advertiser #2's bid is higher, they'll see advertisements from advertiser #2, and you'll get $1 per click from visitors.
So naturally you are thinking, this is great, but I only want advertiser #2 on my site cause you are getting more money. You CAN block Advertiser #1 in Adsense, but that would result you in not getting any revenue during the weekdays from them since Advertiser #2 only advertises on the weekends.
So you should probably not bother trying to play the "block the lower advertiser game".
The reality is advertisers can also block your website specifically if the traffic/visitors which click on their ADs on your site are not good, are not converting into sales, or are the wrong fit. So one week you might see your revenue going up and up in Adsense, but then all of a sudden you see a drop in RPM (Revenue Per thousand Impressions - how much revenue you are making per thousand visitors). The primary reason for this is because a high paying advertiser stopped advertising - maybe on your site specifically, maybe they turned off Display Network advertising, maybe they stopped their campaign since it was seasonal, or maybe they left Adwords cause it wasn't working out for them.
If you are watching the advertisements on your website you'll notice the change in ADs to different products/services - so if you suddenly see a new advertiser which results in a spike in revenue, they might be testing the water - and if your traffic is garbage, meaning it doesn't make it profitable for the advertiser to continue running ADs, then they'll stop. It's as simple as that. Is it starting to click?
Advertisers not only have to be advertising within your niche, they must be targeting your country, location, and timing it with the best bid to get onto your particular website. The advertisers can control a wide varying options of how they spend their money. Maybe they only want to run ads the first week of each month, and then for the next 3.3 weeks, run nothing. Maybe they only run ADs when they want to get rid of inventory or want to boost sales, and hold off when things are slow (seasonal). Maybe All your advertisers only run ADs during the holiday season, and that's when you'll make your money and the rest of the year you'll get nada.
Whatever advertisers choose to do can and will effect your revenue - BUT you can combat this by being in highly profitable niches with lots of advertisers so if one drops out of the bidding process, there are thousands more willing to pay the highest cost possible to advertise on your site - unless your site is not creating profits or you get "smart-priced" cause your website is rather poor and not worth it to Google for you to be in their network at all.
The niche you choose, your website's subject, matters in the Adsense game.
If you are looking to have Adsense be a serious portion of your income you'll have to do one of three things.
1. Generate enough traffic so there is enough clicks from your visitors to generate your target goal of revenue.
2. Be in niches where the cost per click for advertisers (who advertise using Google Adwords) is high, so you don't necessarily need the same amount of traffic as a low CPC (cost per click) niche.
3. Both 1 & 2.
Let's take a scenario where you want to make $4,000 a month in revenue from Adsense from your website(s). I'm going to use SERPWoo's Keyword Finder in this example, you can use any keyword tool which showcases the highest bid CPC in Adwords.
If you go into a niche like 'free porn' (yes it's an extreme example but it's necessary for this guide), you'll notice most CPCs are extremely low, usually under $1, in the below screenshot there are 33,738 possible keywords an Adwords advertiser can target, yet when you switch the filter to "over $1" only 802 results remain. That means 33,728 - 802 = 32,926 keywords (97.6%) are UNDER $1 in CPC:
If you are looking to generate $4K in revenue monthly at let's say the bare minimum of $0.05 per click, you'll need 80,000 clicks on your advertisements monthly. Now doing a bit of math, if 5% of your visitors click your ads (yes that's a realistic number, a bit high actually since the industry average is below 2%), you'll need 80,000 divided by 0.05 (5%) = 1,600,000 monthly visitors to come to your website, to generate 80,000 clicks, to get to your $4,000 monthly revenue goal.
Now sit back and really absorb that. How much time and effort would you need to put in to generate 1.6 million visitors a month (53,334 visitors a day)? And second, if you have the ability to generate 1.6 million visitors a month, would you want to settle for a measly $4,000 in revenue? No. This is one reason Adsense is the "beginner" avenue to making money, but should not be the "end all" tool. You are leaving money on the table by not supplementing your income with other tactics (we'll go into details about different avenues of generating money in the future).
Another thing to consider is the mentality and user intent of the keywords. If a user is typing in a keyword like "free porn", what's the likelihood they are going to click on an advertisement, and then pull out their credit card to pay for the porn site they are visiting? literally ZERO since they are looking for 'FREE porn'. So if you are targeting keywords which will NOT make your advertisers money you'll have less advertisers, and have lower CPC revenue from your Adsense. (You see why 'free porn' was needed).
Overall ranking for a keyword like 'free porn' and needing 1.6 million people monthly from it to generate CPC revenue without any other monetization funnels in place is a bad scenario anyway you cut it. So when you create websites targeting 'lol elo boosting', 'clash of the clan' or whatever other dumb shit you guys waste time messaging me about, you can now understand why I prefer not to waste time engaging in your conversations.
Now let us look at another niche on the other side of the spectrum, 'life insurance'. Insurance itself is a billion dollar niche, so life insurance is more niched down:
You'll immediately notice that once you filter the keywords to over $1 minimum CPC bid, you have 5,592 keywords left out of 7,440 potential - over 75% of their keywords are above $1 versus 'free porn' with 2.4% of their total keywords being OVER $1. And if you look at the keywords themselves they are more competitive (competition strength metric), and their bids are averaging from $10 to $60, with several going above $100, and one at $149.21 PER CLICK.
Now let's say you play on the low end of the spectrum to make it fair to free porn, I'll use $10 - to generate $4000 in monthly income you would need 400 clicks in a month. At a 5% click rate from visitors - 400 / 0.05 = 8000 visitors to my website in a month. That averages 267 visitors a day, versus 53,3334 visitors a day with 'free porn'. And remember we are on the extreme low end of 'life insurance'.
Here are the numbers for CPC and how many visitors you would need daily with a 5% CTR to generate $4,000 a month in 'life insurance':
$10 CPC = 267 visitors daily
$20 CPC = 134 visitors daily
$35 CPC = 77 visitors daily
$60 CPC = 45 visitors daily
^^ these numbers seem more reasonable for daily traffic versus 53,334 visitors a day targeting niches like 'free porn' which have 97.6% of the queried keywords being UNDER $1.
This was an over simplified newbie guide since it doesn't take into consideration relevance, source of traffic, time of day, and much much more. Also in the $4,000 monthly example I didn't take into account that you only get 68% of revenue and Google gets the rest, so increase all CPC numbers by 30-50% for this to make sense. The key take away is if you are going to take the time to create a website, target a niche and use Adsense to generate the primary revenue - make sure you are targeting more profitable niches, more profitable keywords within your content, otherwise you'll be stuck in a battle you cannot win except through sheer volume, volume which you most likely cannot sustain, and the ROI will not be worth it overall. This is why keyword research targeting user intent is extremely important when looking for a niche.
Final word - Adsense should be the LAST option to monetize since there are other ways to generate more revenue, so start off with Adsense, but don't rely upon it forever, otherwise you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
If you have any questions drop them in here.
Google's Adsense allows a user to put a piece of code on their website and display advertisements to earn revenue. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of the advertisements the publisher (owner of the website, YOU, the one who put Adsense up on the site), will get paid. Example of a 300x300 adsense advertisement:
The advertisements comes from advertisers who utilize Google Adwords and their "Display Network" for advertising their products/services. The "Display Network" is the group of publishers(websites) which display banner advertisements, textlinks, and other rich media on their websites for Google in exchange for revenue. Once you put up Adsense on your website and are approved you will now be consider a part of the display network.
Now you have to understand this is a zero sum game. If there are no advertisers there is no revenue for you. So if you create a website in a niche no advertiser is targeting or wants to target, you will get the bare minimum revenue, if any revenue at all.
When advertiser #1 uses Adwords to place a bid, this is an auction style system, on a keyword which your website targets, you will start seeing their advertisements on your website. When a user clicks on the advertisement you will get a percentage of the amount they bid.
Let's say they placed a $1 bid for a keyword one of your pages with Adsense is targeting. When a visitor on your website clicks the advertisement you will get for simplification 50% (The real amount is close to 68% - Source: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en). So in our example you'll get $0.50 out of the $1 bid.
Now let's say Advertiser #2 comes in and bids $2, but only on Weekends. When a visitor visits your website on weekdays, they'll see the first advertiser's ads, and if they click you'll get 0.50 revenue per click. However when a visitor visits on weekends, since advertiser #2's bid is higher, they'll see advertisements from advertiser #2, and you'll get $1 per click from visitors.
So naturally you are thinking, this is great, but I only want advertiser #2 on my site cause you are getting more money. You CAN block Advertiser #1 in Adsense, but that would result you in not getting any revenue during the weekdays from them since Advertiser #2 only advertises on the weekends.
So you should probably not bother trying to play the "block the lower advertiser game".The reality is advertisers can also block your website specifically if the traffic/visitors which click on their ADs on your site are not good, are not converting into sales, or are the wrong fit. So one week you might see your revenue going up and up in Adsense, but then all of a sudden you see a drop in RPM (Revenue Per thousand Impressions - how much revenue you are making per thousand visitors). The primary reason for this is because a high paying advertiser stopped advertising - maybe on your site specifically, maybe they turned off Display Network advertising, maybe they stopped their campaign since it was seasonal, or maybe they left Adwords cause it wasn't working out for them.
If you are watching the advertisements on your website you'll notice the change in ADs to different products/services - so if you suddenly see a new advertiser which results in a spike in revenue, they might be testing the water - and if your traffic is garbage, meaning it doesn't make it profitable for the advertiser to continue running ADs, then they'll stop. It's as simple as that. Is it starting to click?
Advertisers not only have to be advertising within your niche, they must be targeting your country, location, and timing it with the best bid to get onto your particular website. The advertisers can control a wide varying options of how they spend their money. Maybe they only want to run ads the first week of each month, and then for the next 3.3 weeks, run nothing. Maybe they only run ADs when they want to get rid of inventory or want to boost sales, and hold off when things are slow (seasonal). Maybe All your advertisers only run ADs during the holiday season, and that's when you'll make your money and the rest of the year you'll get nada.
Whatever advertisers choose to do can and will effect your revenue - BUT you can combat this by being in highly profitable niches with lots of advertisers so if one drops out of the bidding process, there are thousands more willing to pay the highest cost possible to advertise on your site - unless your site is not creating profits or you get "smart-priced" cause your website is rather poor and not worth it to Google for you to be in their network at all.
The niche you choose, your website's subject, matters in the Adsense game.
If you are looking to have Adsense be a serious portion of your income you'll have to do one of three things.
1. Generate enough traffic so there is enough clicks from your visitors to generate your target goal of revenue.
2. Be in niches where the cost per click for advertisers (who advertise using Google Adwords) is high, so you don't necessarily need the same amount of traffic as a low CPC (cost per click) niche.
3. Both 1 & 2.
Let's take a scenario where you want to make $4,000 a month in revenue from Adsense from your website(s). I'm going to use SERPWoo's Keyword Finder in this example, you can use any keyword tool which showcases the highest bid CPC in Adwords.
If you go into a niche like 'free porn' (yes it's an extreme example but it's necessary for this guide), you'll notice most CPCs are extremely low, usually under $1, in the below screenshot there are 33,738 possible keywords an Adwords advertiser can target, yet when you switch the filter to "over $1" only 802 results remain. That means 33,728 - 802 = 32,926 keywords (97.6%) are UNDER $1 in CPC:
If you are looking to generate $4K in revenue monthly at let's say the bare minimum of $0.05 per click, you'll need 80,000 clicks on your advertisements monthly. Now doing a bit of math, if 5% of your visitors click your ads (yes that's a realistic number, a bit high actually since the industry average is below 2%), you'll need 80,000 divided by 0.05 (5%) = 1,600,000 monthly visitors to come to your website, to generate 80,000 clicks, to get to your $4,000 monthly revenue goal.
Now sit back and really absorb that. How much time and effort would you need to put in to generate 1.6 million visitors a month (53,334 visitors a day)? And second, if you have the ability to generate 1.6 million visitors a month, would you want to settle for a measly $4,000 in revenue? No. This is one reason Adsense is the "beginner" avenue to making money, but should not be the "end all" tool. You are leaving money on the table by not supplementing your income with other tactics (we'll go into details about different avenues of generating money in the future).
Another thing to consider is the mentality and user intent of the keywords. If a user is typing in a keyword like "free porn", what's the likelihood they are going to click on an advertisement, and then pull out their credit card to pay for the porn site they are visiting? literally ZERO since they are looking for 'FREE porn'. So if you are targeting keywords which will NOT make your advertisers money you'll have less advertisers, and have lower CPC revenue from your Adsense. (You see why 'free porn' was needed).
Overall ranking for a keyword like 'free porn' and needing 1.6 million people monthly from it to generate CPC revenue without any other monetization funnels in place is a bad scenario anyway you cut it. So when you create websites targeting 'lol elo boosting', 'clash of the clan' or whatever other dumb shit you guys waste time messaging me about, you can now understand why I prefer not to waste time engaging in your conversations.
Now let us look at another niche on the other side of the spectrum, 'life insurance'. Insurance itself is a billion dollar niche, so life insurance is more niched down:
You'll immediately notice that once you filter the keywords to over $1 minimum CPC bid, you have 5,592 keywords left out of 7,440 potential - over 75% of their keywords are above $1 versus 'free porn' with 2.4% of their total keywords being OVER $1. And if you look at the keywords themselves they are more competitive (competition strength metric), and their bids are averaging from $10 to $60, with several going above $100, and one at $149.21 PER CLICK.
Now let's say you play on the low end of the spectrum to make it fair to free porn, I'll use $10 - to generate $4000 in monthly income you would need 400 clicks in a month. At a 5% click rate from visitors - 400 / 0.05 = 8000 visitors to my website in a month. That averages 267 visitors a day, versus 53,3334 visitors a day with 'free porn'. And remember we are on the extreme low end of 'life insurance'.
Here are the numbers for CPC and how many visitors you would need daily with a 5% CTR to generate $4,000 a month in 'life insurance':
$10 CPC = 267 visitors daily
$20 CPC = 134 visitors daily
$35 CPC = 77 visitors daily
$60 CPC = 45 visitors daily
^^ these numbers seem more reasonable for daily traffic versus 53,334 visitors a day targeting niches like 'free porn' which have 97.6% of the queried keywords being UNDER $1.
This was an over simplified newbie guide since it doesn't take into consideration relevance, source of traffic, time of day, and much much more. Also in the $4,000 monthly example I didn't take into account that you only get 68% of revenue and Google gets the rest, so increase all CPC numbers by 30-50% for this to make sense. The key take away is if you are going to take the time to create a website, target a niche and use Adsense to generate the primary revenue - make sure you are targeting more profitable niches, more profitable keywords within your content, otherwise you'll be stuck in a battle you cannot win except through sheer volume, volume which you most likely cannot sustain, and the ROI will not be worth it overall. This is why keyword research targeting user intent is extremely important when looking for a niche.
Final word - Adsense should be the LAST option to monetize since there are other ways to generate more revenue, so start off with Adsense, but don't rely upon it forever, otherwise you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
If you have any questions drop them in here.
Last edited:
I have been using adsense for a year and still learned some (now they seem) obvious things that I was doing wrong. 
