A million page views only earns $60 from Google Ads. Am I getting ripped off?

Question

My blog and forum (BestParentEver.com) recently received a million page views in less than five months. There has been a GoogleAd or Adbrite ad on almost every page, as well as the occasional Adpinion or Amazon Associates ad. But in all that time, we've only made about $60. Does this sound right? Is that all these websites make? Is anyone else making more from these kinds of ads? We're not trying to get rich, but this barely covers our hosting costs.

Answer 1

That's the thing with Adsense -- traffic is great, but it is not a guarantee that you can earn more if you have more traffic. One website with 10,000 uniques a day can earn $50 a month while another may earn $5,000. I have a site with 1/8 of your traffic but earns more than $60 at 6 am everyday, every single day.



It just seems that your site is better off with banner ad networks that pay for CPM as your audiences do not click, keywords too low paying. With CPM, the more traffic you have the higher your earnings.



With Adsense, the amount you can earn will depend on the



1. Responsiveness of audience to the ads = A travel website that provides information on travel to Spain will attract visitors looking for ways to arrange their travel and spend money on their vacation to Spain. Your site provides the info, but the ads will provide hotels, travel agencies, tourist destinations, car rentals -- ads that are likely to get the attention of the users of your site. This is a site that will most likely do well with Adsense. However, if you are a gaming website where the main purpose of the user is to play games on your site, then Adsense will not perform as well.



2. Ad format = some types of ads do better than others depending on your content and layout. In our case, large rectangles in the middle of the content is the best, while leaderboards do not generate as much as income. Skys are the worst for us. Experiment and measure the results via channels and see which formats work best for you.



3. Ad placement - check Google's heat map as they have tested where the best placements are https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=17954&ctx=en:search&query=adsense+heat+map&topic=0&type=f



4. Ad colors - sometimes ads blended into the content works wonders, but sometimes ads that contrast your site colors work best



5. Number of ad units on a page = we are allowed maximum of 3 ads + 1 ad links + 1 search box on a page. Maximize the allowed number based on the resulting look of your page (you don't want an overkill of ads). Users going to your page and reading your content may ignore the banner or rectangle at the top of the page, but may click on the ad at the bottom of the article



6. Smartpricing - the big unknown in Adsense. No one knows how this actually works. But it can affect the pricing of the ads on your site. If the advertiser paid for $0.50/click - but your site is smartpriced - then the cost may be discounted lower (e.g. $0.25). So you may try to develop a site based on high paying keywords but if smartpricing gets to you, then you may not get as much per click as what you are expecting from your keywords.



Here is Google's explanation of smart pricing https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=9562&query=smart+pricing&topic=0&type=f



Google's smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results -- such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups -- we reduce the price you pay for that click.



Experiment with the factors above (except smartpricing, which you can't control), and see which combination works best. Remember though that not all sites do well with Adsense - even if you get gazillions of traffic but your visitors are not interested in looking for ways to spend their money, they won't be interested in your ads and won't click.

Answer 2

Handsome is right, placing the ads the way you did won't get you a lot of clicks. There is just one ad unit at the bottom of your pages, place another one above your first article on page and may be a third one below the first paragraph. (You are allowed to place up to three adsense ad units per page) Positioning and ad unit size is very important for adsense earnings. Anyway there is no static rule every site is different and has different kinds of visitors. You have to experiment a bit. To give you an idea; to earn $ 60 from adsense I don't need 500.000 page impressions - about 3000 are usually doing "the job" on my sites.

Answer 3

Hi,



In my view, you lucky to even earn $60/- from AdSense. If you want people to click on your ads, you need to know why they even bother to click on it in the first place - Does the ads happen to promote some information or products that your visitors need, this is what I always tell my subscribers when they run into problem with AdSense.



I really hope you would improve your AdSense earning after reading my answer.

Answer 4

i seen your site , my dear friend this is not the way of showing ads.

in your site ads are very few and people usually can't able to notice ads.

i myself writing blogs and earning lots of money , more than you.. by getting merely 500 page views daily.



this program has lots of potential , its a matter of time and correct ads placement.

Answer 5

It is a huge amount of money, and not as good as some of their past ads (personal opinion) and as my husband is already a convert it does seem a waste of money, he would like to have seen the cost of the ad deducted from each pint! Cheers.

Answer 6

Don't they calculate your earnings based on how many times viewers click your ads?