Google Adsense & Earnings

Being Realistic About Google Adsense Earnings

To make any sort of money with Adsense requires one of two things : a few pages with LOTS of traffic or a lot of pages with low to moderate traffic. Let's do the math. The average CTR (Click Through Rate, or the amount of people, expressed in percentage terms, that view the add and actually click on an ad) varies from publisher to publisher and web page to web page, but a 2% CTR is considered "good" in the web publishing industry. Thus, if the "Ads by Google" is displayed on your site 1000 times in a day (also known as how many impressions you get), if you have a 2% CTR, you can expect 20 clicks a day, on average.
How much you earn from each of those clicks is highly variable. Your earnings depend on your sites topic, internal Google algorithms as well as how much money advertisers are willing to "bid" in Google AdWords to have their ads displayed. There is no general rule how much you can earn for each click. On Big Sky Fishing, I've earned anywhere from between .04 cents per click on the low-end, to over $3.00 on the higher end. The average earnings per click tends to run between .20 cents and .30 cents, fluctuating somewhat during the year (higher in the summer, less in the winter).
So, for simplicity, let's say you earn .25 cents per click. And you get 20 clicks per day. This leads to a daily income of $5.00. From here, you can let your imagination run wild - coming up with all sorts of various earning potential estimates by varying the click-through rate, the amount paid per click, how many times your ad is displayed, etc...

Your Pages Content

More than anything else, the content of your page drives your earnings. Pages that are about specific topics and which are in high-demand by advertisers (and thus, there exists a lot of "ad inventory") will earn more money than general news pages or pages that are "multi-topic."
The moral of the story is this. For maximum Adsense revenue, it's generally good to have shorter pages that are laser focused on a specific topic.

Ad Placement

Ad placement is crucial in Google AdSense. If people don't click on your ads, no matter how many times they're displayed, you'll still earn nothing. Where you place ads really is dependent upon your site layout and your traffic. But, a good starting point on the best places to locate ads is by visiting the Google Heat Map page on the Adsense help section.
I'll be the first to admit that Big Sky Fishing.Com is not a "model site" in terms of ad placement. On this site, most of my ads are displayed below the "fold"...that is, a visitor does not see them immediately when they view the page. Generally, and my statistics prove it, ads displayed "below the fold" have a lower click-through rate than those displayed "above the fold" (how much you earn "per-click" remains the same, but how many times people click on an ad is lower).
So, why do I keep the ads there? Simp...I have no better place for them. My site's layout is sort of set, and to make room for Google Ads "above the fold" wouldn't look good (and regular visitors wouldn't like them), require redoing my entire left-side menu system or redesigning the whole layout (especially the top header) of the site. Ultimately, and also because my content pages tend to run a 1.5% to 2% CTR, I've decided to leave things as they are. I guess I'm a believer in NOT forcing ads on people. And if that means acccepting less income in the short-term, then so be it.

Ad Blending

The term ad blending refers to how your ads "blend in" with the content of your page. The general idea is to make your ads "blend in" with your content, in hopes that people won’t simply ignore them due to ad blindness.
There is logic behind this, and to some degree, I use this logic on Big Sky Fishing. However, for several years, many Adsense publishers pushed this to the extreme, laying out the ads in such a way so as to confuse visitors about "what was an ad" and "what was a link." In particular, what was popular was putting a graphic just above a horizontal banner, leading visitors to the site to believe that they were clicking on a menu choice and not an ad.
This was bad for visitors to the web page (it was a huge inconvenience) and, moreover, it was also bad for the advertisers (people were clicking on the ads by "accident" instead of "deliberately"). As such, Google changed their policy, requiring that all ads not be "so blended into" the content of the page that they are indistinguishable from normal links on the web page.
Additionally, fooling your web site visitors is a one-trick pony. Would you visit a web page ever again if you thought you were clicking on an interesting menu link...only to be whisked away to someplace else? Remember, web publishing is more than just about "making money" NOW. It's about having a web site that makes money today AND tomorrow.

Conclusion

Let's summarize this length article. You, as a publisher, can earn money simply by writing content by using Google AdSense. You simply sign up for their program (you must have a website to do this), post your content, slap an Adsense banner on your site, and pres...you’re in business.
How much money you make depends entirely on how much traffic you get to your site. Scant traffic = little to no income. Additional factors that impact your earnings include your sites "niche," the actual content of the web page itself, the time of year, how you place your ads, and several other things, too.
There are many true success stories about Adsense publishers earning $10,000 or more a month. However, the ranks of these Adsense publishers are small. If you’re just starting out, don’t expect to be pulling down $1000's of dollars a few months later. While it can happen, the odds are long. Instead, Adsense earnings tend to increase slowly - as you expand your site and as more people find it.
Long-term success with Google Adsense requires writing quality content that will, over time, draw in people to your site. Google Adsense, except for a few lucky people, is not a get-rich quick scheme. Instead, Adsense provides a nifty way to have a "anything but steady" monthly supplemental income...all for doing something you enjoy doing (publishing content on the Internet).

How to Earn Money Through Google Adsense

Creating an Ad Unit How to Design Your Ad Campaign What's it Worth?

Edited by Zoe Volt, Krystle, Tom Viren, Brandywine and 61 others

Money for nothing? Well, not quite—but close! Google’s AdSense is a revenue-sharing opportunity for small, medium and large web sites that places ads for goods and services that are relevant to the content of your site, targeted to the people who frequent your pages. In turn, you get paid a small amount when the ad is either displayed on your page, or clicked on. We'll show you some good ideas that added to your own, will help increase your AdSense revenue.

Method 1 of 3: Creating an Ad Unit

1
Sign into your AdSense account. Go to AdSense, and click on My ads in the upper left.
- Create a new Ad unit. In the main screen area, under Content > Ad units, click the +New ad unit button.
Ad
2
Name your ad unit. This can be any name that suits you, but many find creating a standard naming format helps them manage large amounts of data.
- For example, using [target site for the ad]_[ad size]_[ad date] is one approach, that would look like this: mywebsite.com_336x280_080112. Whatever format you decide to use for naming, make that your standard.
3
Pick a size. See "How to Do It" below for details, but Google has found best practices that generate more clicks.
4
Set your ad type. This determines the types of ads you will see on your website: text only; text and image/rich media; and image/rich media only.
5
Create a custom channel. A custom channel lets you group ad units however you choose, such as by size or location on a page.
- You can track performance by custom channel, and turn your channel into a targetable ad placement so advertisers can target their ads to your ad units.
6
Create your ad style. This lets you choose colors for the various components of an ad: border, title, background, text, and URL. It also lets you choose corner styles, from square to very rounded, a font family, and a default font size.
- It's good practice to create an ad style that harmonizes with the look and colors of your website.
- You can use Google's presets, or use your own custom settings. In either case, a sample ad on the right will show you how your ad will appear
7
Get the code for the ad. When you're done with the ad setup, either save your ad unit, or click the Save and get code button at the bottom to get the HTML code for your site.
- If adding code to your site is a puzzle you want help with, click here for Google's code implementation guide.

Method 2 of 3: How to Design Your Ad Campaign

1
Analyze your content. In designing any kind of ad campaign, it's crucial to know who your target is. If you're writing a food blog that caters to single men on a budget, for example, you've narrowed the scope of who you will be appealing to. You've also got a very good focus point for your ads. What are things single men who cook drawn to? Here are some possibilities: dating, cars, movies, politics, and live music.
- Think about who frequents your website, write down what you feel are the most important characteristics of your viewers.
2
Fine tune advertisements. While AdSense will auto-populate your page with what they feel are relevant ads, use their tools to provide tighter controls.
- Set up channels. Channels are like labels that let you group your ad units your way—by color, category, or pages. By setting up channels, you can get detailed reports on the performance of your ad units, and use that to your advantage. For example:
  - Use one style of ad on one group of pages, and another style on another group. Track and compare the performance of the two styles, and pick the best performer.
  - Compare performance on pages that focus on different things. For example, if your pages about gardening perform better than your pages on cooking, you might consider adding more to your gardening pages.
  - If you have separate domains, set up a channel to track each of them to see which is generating the most clicks.
3
Optimize your ad placement and site design. Google has found there are places where ads are more effective, and places where they are less effective.
- Ads that appear when you first arrive at your page (i.e., "above the fold" as they say in the newspaper world) tend to be more effective than those that are below the fold.
- Ads on upper left tend to perform much better than ads on the lower right.
- Ads directly above the primary content, and ads that appear at the bottom of the page and above the footer tend to perform very well.
- Wider ads are generally more successful, as they are much easier to read.
- Ads that display images or video perform very well.
- Using colors that complement your website colors will make them more readable, and so more effective.
4
Learn how AdSense works. AdSense automatically sends ads to your site based on a few different criteria:
- Contextual targeting. AdSense crawlers scan your page, analyze your content, and serve up ads designed match your content. They do this using keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the link structure of the web.
- Placement targeting. This allows advertisers to choose to run their ads on specific subsections of a publisher's website. If your website matches an advertisers criteria, their ad will appear on your page.
- Interest-based advertising. This lets advertisers reach users based on their interests and the user's previous interactions with them, such as a visit to their website. Google's Ads Preferences Manager allows users themselves to choose their interest categories, which further helps advertisers focus their ad campaigns. This method is good for monetizing your site more efficiently, as it increases the value for advertisers and provides a more relevant experience for users.

Method 3 of 3: What's it Worth?

1
Manage your expectations. When you sign up for AdSense, you'll want to know what kind of revenue can you expect to see. There is a lot that goes into what kind of return you can expect, and managing those things will help you maximize your earning potential.
2
Traffic. First and formost, in order to generate any kind of revenue from AdSense you must have people clicking on your ads. In order for this to happen, you need to have people on your site, reading your content! Whether you have a business website, or a personal blog, the rule is the same: Get the word out!
- Heavily trafficked large sites can see over a million hits a day, whereas a blog might feel lucky if they have 100 visitors a day.
- For every thousand page impressions (views) you receive, you may earn from $.05 to $5. Yes, that's a broad range—over a month, that is between $1.50 and $150.00! Where in that range you can expect to frequent depends entirely on you, your site, and your promotion efforts.
3
Cost Per Click (CPC). This paid every time somebody clicks an ad on your page. No, you can't click your own ad—Google will see this, and shut you down so fast your head will spin. The advertisers set the price for these ads, and they can vary greatly.
- An advertiser may spend a lot on a per-click basis, but that ad may generate very little interest on your site.
- An ad that may generate $.03 per click may get 100 hits, but that doesn't add up to much.
4
Clickthrough Rate (CTR). This is the percentage of visitors to your site compared to how many them actually clicked on an ad. If 100 people came to your site, and 1 of them clicked an ad, your CTR is 1%, and that's not an unreasonable number. You can see how getting more traffic to your site will really make a difference.
5
Revenue per 1000 impressions (RPM). This is an estimate of how much you might receive if you have 1000 impressions (page views).
- If you made, for example, $1 for 100 impressions, your RPM would be $10. There is no guarantee you'll make that, but it's a good way to check the overall performance of your site.
6
Content is king. The quality of your content is an important factor in understanding your earning potential. If your site provides rich, compelling content and a great user experience, you will have more interested users. Google's crawlers will also have an easier time determining the type of ad content would best fit on your site. Interested users + targeted ads = $$$
7
Start building keyword-rich pages. Liberally seed with well researched, profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links to your site.
- If your site is about topics such as debt consolidation, web hosting or asbestos-related cancer, you’ll earn much more per click than if it’s about free puppies.
- If you concentrate only on top-paying keywords, you’ll face stiff competition. What you want are keywords that are high in demand and low in supply, so do some careful keyword research before you build your pages.
Ad

Video

Create a new Google Ad Unit for Google Ad Sense.

Tips

Quality is the most important part of any web site. If your site does not contain the content of expected quality the visitor might not come back,
Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do say that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags.
Some webmasters are designing brand new sites specifically for serving AdSense text ads, however it’s against the AdSense rules to design a site purely for AdSense, so you’ll want to include a few Affiliate links or sell your own product, too.
A great resource for earning money is using traffic driving sites like Flixya You can sign up for Google Adsense and Flixya, without the costs or time needed to build traffic or your own site.
Avoid non-English characters on English pages. There is a bug which can cause these pages to show irrelevant French ads.

Warnings

Do not click your ads. If Google catches you, they will suspend your account and retain any earnings you might have. However, if you, by mistakes, click your ads for one or two times, Google will keep that earning but rather not to punish you as long as it doesn't happen constantly.
In early internet days, you may see a site notice asking everyone to click the ads. The day has gone long time ago. If Google detects possible cheating, there is no such thing as presumption of innocence. They assume that you are guilty.
If you don't have any content, Google will have to guess what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant.
Google has a lot of restrictions on how the ads have to be displayed. One of the major reasons for account suspension is that webmasters tried to blur the ads and mislead others to think that it's "content". For simplicity, never attempt to use CSS to hide Google's logo unless you're authorized to do it!