Adsense Basics - what 7 years of running Adsense has taught me

If you have signed up for Google's Adsense program and figured out how to get ads running on your website or your pages on someone else's site, you may still be confused about what to do next and what to expect.

I have some answers for you. I have been using Adsense since the summer of 2003 and have been paid many thousands of dollars because of that. No, I don't earn enough from that to live on, though there are other people who make a very good living  from Adsense earnings alone.

But you probably will not earn much.

Oh, you might. With some work and some luck and some time, you might do quite well. It can happen, and like most things, the more effort you put in, the more you can get out.

But the harsh reality is that most people running Adsense ads make pennies. I mean literally pennies. Not "they don't make very much money relatively speaking", not "they don't make enough to live on but it's nice extra money". No, they only make pennies.

I hope that doesn't upset you. It's just reality. The vast majority of people who would love to get rich from Adsense will barely make enough to pay for a cup of coffee.

Really - pennies

I don't mean a cup of coffee per day, either. I mean per month. A lot of those folks would be very, very happy if they made a dollar or so per day, but they don't, and you probably won't either.

That can't be true

I know, you've been reading the forums and other get rich quick advice and all you need to do is create a bunch of spammy backlinks to your content and soon you'll be rolling in dough. It's easy, apparently.

Well, it isn't, and survey after survey shows that a 60% or more of people make less than $100 a month from Adsense and most of those make less than $10!

Ten dollars a month? That seems incredible, but the surveys tell the story.

One of the surveys is from someone right here at this site. Relache runs an earnings poll regularly and you can see the live results on-line. That shows 69% at $100 or less from ALL on-line income sources.

Problogger regularly runs surveys asking readers how much income they make from Adsense et al. The results are fairly consistent, and show the same sorts of figures. For example, here is the poll from 2006:

From ProBlogger Earnings Poll Results - April 2006

57% earned under $100.00

19% earned over $1000.00

13% earned over $2500.00

7% earned over $15000.00

A more recent poll shows not much has changed:

29% made under $10.00 per month

12% between $10.00 and $29.00

12% between $30.00 and $99.00

17% between $100.00 and $499.00

Depression sets in

So is that it? Are you doomed to Internet poverty?

Not necessarily. One of the things that these polls don't show is how hard the respondents worked at it. For all we know, a person who earned less than $10.00 might have put up one silly little web page about a bad day they had at work. The people earning many thousands of dollars may have done much more work and put up many more pages.

Those polls also neglect the "I'm not really trying to make money" aspect. Many people put up web pages for other reasons.  Their primary interest may be in promoting a business or they may just love to write - many an aspiring author puts their unsaleable efforts up on the web as they wait to be discovered  - any income from those things is just a bonus. 

Getting Serious

That's not you, though. You want to make money from Adsense. How do you move beyond pennies?

There are only a few factors to consider, but the devil is in the details.

Traffic

Making money from Adsense is primarily a numbers game. You can expect to earn something between $2.00 and $5.00 per 1,000 page views per month.

A few examples might help you visualize that. Let's say you want to earn $1,000 a month. You will probably need 200,000 to 500,000 page views to accomplish that.

If you've just started out and are getting less than 1,000 pageviews per month, that alone is the major reason you aren't making Adsense money. It really is that simple. Your one thousand page views will likely net you less than $5.00. As Google won't pay you anything until they owe you at least $100.00, you might have a long wait ahead of you.

How to get more traffic is a monstrous subject all by itself, so I'll just ignore that here. However, you do need to know that a lot of advice that you will find on-line about building traffic can be dangerous - you can get banned from Adsense from engaging in the shenanigans that are often highly promoted and praised.

The best way to get traffic is simply to have engaging and useful content that people want to read.

I know, that's hard. It's so tempting to believe that there is a magic shortcut with no risks. There is not. There are people who play games with Google and sometimes the best of them get away with it. However, you need to realize that Google WILL ban those people if it finds out that it has been tricked. I don't think you should take that risk.

There are other bad behaviors (like clicking on your own ads) that can get you banned from Adsense.

Positioning, Colors and Size

Where the ads run in relation to text matters. So does the size of the ads and the color schemes you choose.

At some sites (such as right here at HubPages), you may not have full control over these settings. You can control placement to some extent as is suggested at the rather optimistic "How to make $100 per day" articles you will find around the web.

In my experience, position and size are what matters. Big ads, high on the page, are what make the most money for me.

At your own site, you have complete freedom and can benefit from Google's own suggestions on placement, size and colors.

A/B Tests

Google has a little blurb about The ABCs of A/B Testing. I hate to be a wet blanket, but for most  low traffic publishers, that's a pointless exercise with little to gain. Unless you have very high volume, you simply don't have enough data to draw any useful conclusions from this kind of test.

Context

The things you write about influence the kinds of ads that appear on your pages. Getting a good match for your readers is important, which is why Google works hard to determine your visitors interests (what were they doing before they arrived at your page) and what you are offering them (what your page actually says and what other inks to your page say).

Google can do you wrong. If you are writing about exotic fish, and Google is displaying ads for trout fishing equipment, your readers are less likely to be interested in the ads (assuming that it was interest in exotic fish that brought them to you in the first place, of course).

It is unfortunately easy for Google or any other ad company to get confused by your text and put up an inappropriate ad. The best way to combat that is by using the keywords you do want them to pick up.

Unfortunately, writing for the benefit of your readers and writing for the benefit of search engines and writing for the benefit of the ad placement software are three different goals that may conflict. It is, simply, an art. The more you can stress the subject matter you need without puzzling or alienating human readers, the more relevant the ads will be.

Value

Some ads are worth more than others. If a visitor clicks on ad, it might be worth only a penny to you. You'll need a hundred thousand clicks to make a thousand dollars that way. You'd probably need many millions of visitors to get that many clicks.

Other ads are worth more. If you could get a lot of $10.00 ads appearing on your pages, you'd only need 100 clicks to meet that $1,000.00 goal. You could do that with 15,000 pageviews a month!

Unfortunately, $10.00 ads are very rare. I see a few now and then, but they are not common and the competition to attract such ads is fierce.

In todays Internet Ad market, most ads are worth less than a dollar. That's reality. If you are able to regularly attract higher paying ads, you are doing well. If most of your ads are well under that, you will need more traffic than average.

Of course your results will vary, but generally speaking, the "click through" percentage (people clicking on ads) will be less than 1% of visitors, and while some specific ads do carry higher payloads, most will bring you less than a dollar in revenue. So, it's simple math: if you have 100 visitors a month, you might not even get one click, and if you do, it might not earn you enough to pay for a cup of coffee.

Picking better paying subject areas doesn't have to mean writing about things you don't know. For example, if you are equally capable of writing 500 words about mid 19th century American coins or the equally fascinating details of early English copper coins, it would make sense to write more about whichever attracts the higher paying ads and the more appropriate ads. If you have equal fervor for either subject, why not write mostly about the one that pays better?

Analytics

Google Analytics can be a great help in learning about which of your pages earn the most money, how your visitors found the page, and what (if any) pages they visited prior to clicking on that ad. If you don't have an Analytics account now, go get one. Even if your traffic volume is too low now to get any real value from it, you will be glad to have the history to look back on later. Do this now.

One of the things you will likely learn almost immediately is that frequent visitors usually don't click on ads. Your best visitors for Adsense are those who come by way of search.

That doesn't mean regulars have no value. Those people are the ones who will buy other things, like an e-book you have for sale and consulting or other services you might offer.

Another lesson learned is that channel data distorts reality. For example, you may have a "Main Ad" channel that shows 30 clicks and $24.00 in income for yesterday. From that, you might assume that each click was worth 80 cents, but if you look at Analytics, you may find that one click at a certain page was worth $6.00 and the other 29 were all low paying.

Blogs aren't a great format

Unfortunately, typical Blogs present several topics on one page. Any one of the topics might attract a useful and relevant ad, but when mashed together as a group, you may get nothing useful at all. That's why splitting articles off to "permalink" pages where the content doesn't compete with other material is important. It should be obvious that it is also important to drive readers to those single pages: some people do this by presenting only a "teaser" on the main blog page; a short paragraph with a "Read More" link that goes to the single page version. Or, you can ignore that problem and depend on search engines to drive visitors to individual pages - but keep in mind that will only work if your site is popular and well-indexed.

Smart Pricing

Jensense reports that one poorly converting site can "smart price" an entire AdSense account. The gist of it is that if you run Adsense on multiple sites, a poorly performing site in the mix can adversely affect your income from others.

The catch-22 is that you don't know you have a "bad" site, and Google doesn't want to give you separate accounts for each of your sites. So if this is true, you are really stuck: run Adsense or don't, no in-between choice.

"Poorly Converting" doesn't mean no clicks.  In fact, it probably means lots of clicks, but the clicks didn't turn into sales so the advertisers are disappointed.  As you have no way of knowing whether or not people clicking on your ads actually followed through and purchased, you are totally blind here.

This is always a bad month

Or, this is always a good month. People say all sorts of things about Adsense earnings.

Here are my actual earnings since the late summer of 2003. You can easily see that earnings vary all of the map.

Year 2003 Quarter 3 $ 2954.91

Year 2003 Quarter 4 $ 2570.9

Year 2004 Quarter 1 $ 2480.18

Year 2004 Quarter 2 $ 2028.09

Year 2004 Quarter 3 $ 1804.64

Year 2004 Quarter 4 $ 1868.3

Year 2005 Quarter 1 $ 2838.93

Year 2005 Quarter 2 $ 2891.12

Year 2005 Quarter 3 $ 3324.52

Year 2005 Quarter 4 $ 2315.78

Year 2006 Quarter 1 $ 2577.64

Year 2006 Quarter 2 $ 2303.85

Year 2006 Quarter 3 $ 2453.63

Year 2006 Quarter 4 $ 2668.27

Year 2007 Quarter 1 $ 2394.99

Year 2007 Quarter 2 $ 2388.82

Year 2007 Quarter 3 $ 2594.45

Year 2007 Quarter 4 $ 2267.03

Year 2008 Quarter 1 $ 1947.23

Year 2008 Quarter 2 $ 1818.45

Year 2008 Quarter 3 $ 2190.19

Year 2008 Quarter 4 $ 2097.04

Year 2009 Quarter 1 $ 1904.96

Year 2009 Quarter 2 $ 1796.46

Year 2009 Quarter 3 $ 2439.31

Year 2009 Quarter 4 $ 2341.48

Year 2010 Quarter 1 $ 2177.75

Year 2010 Quarter 2 $ 2148.12

Year 2010 Quarter 3 $ 2530.14

Year 2010 Quarter 4 $ 2,675.72

The Daily Graph

Your experience may be very different, but most of my Adsense income comes in the late morning to mid afternoon. It is rare for me to find more than a dollar credited at 6:00 or 7:00 AM (Eastern Time), but by 9:00 or 10:00 it will be building.

By noon, I usually have half of the daily total and 75% of it by 6:00 PM.

For me, weekends and holidays generally drop by as much as 50%. I'm very happy when the decrease is only 30%.

Adjustments

If you check yesterday's income and then later look at the full month by day, you will probably find discrepancies. For me, these are usually small: often a few cents, sometimes as much as half a dollar. This is normal.

If you are only making small amounts, of course these adjustments will affect you more - they are a greater percentage of your income.

Brain Dump

This has been a bit of a brain dump on what 7 years of running Adsense has taught me.  I hope it has been useful to you and, as always, I'm happy to answer questions in the comments.

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