AdSense Specials
AdSense earnings and 'passive income'
First, the bad news: you won't make a quick buck from your website without work and effort. Before you can monetize a website, you need to invest a lot of work to achieve the quality that will then bring in regular income. And even if you get past the initial hurdle, you will still need to maintain and expand the content and the site.
The good news is that with patience, perseverance and diligence, you can lay the foundations for a regular and sustainable income.
Success factors
What are the success factors for earning a regular income from AdSense?
Made for Adsense?
First, a failure factor: If you just want to cobble together websites quickly and then make a lot of money from AdSense, you will be disappointed. That might have been possible 15 years ago, but now therequirements for websites have risen sharply. There is even a special designation for these sites: MFA - Made for AdSense. In general, these sites have no chance of being approved.
Industry resp. niche
Depending on your website's target audience, industry or niche, this will affect its monetisation potential. If you only focus your website content on money making keywords, the competition may be very high and the website will have little success.
The best way to find a topic is to choose one that you know a lot about and are passionate about. A topic that you only find with the help of AI tools is unlikely to be successful in the long run.
Content: Quantity and quality
If you focus on content and quality, you are on the right track. You can also influence quantity by creating lots of content. Keyword research can also help you come up with ideas for adjacent and related topics that can bring your site to the forefront.
SEO - Search engine optimisation
Websites want to be found and the most important tool for this is the search engine. Therefore, you should familiarise yourself with the basic terms of search engine optimisation. Terms such as on-page and off-page optimisation should be familiar to you.
Continuous improvement
Test, try, change, evolve: A website and its monetisation are not static. They can and must evolve. If you stand still, both in terms of content and technology, you will lose the success you have achieved. It is a continuous process that can lead you to improvements and also to more income.
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The basics of earning money with AdSense
There are a number of content and formal requirements for approving an AdSense account, which have been covered in theAdSense for beginnersseries. Here, we will focus on the results, the income you can earn with your approved AdSense account.
Revenue and revenue share
When advertisers book ads, they are willing to pay for them. This is known as the revenue or sales generated by the ads. The advertiser then pays AdSense and you receive your share through a revenue share. Revenue share percentages have changed since February 2024:
- AdSense for content pages: Participation on the basis of CPM
- AdSense for search pages: 51 percent
Search results pages can also be integrated into your website, for example if you include a search box and then display ads on the results page.
Now you earn money on a CPM (cost per mille) basis, where you earn money just for showing the ad.
How much can you earn? Like so many things in life, it depends.
Value of ads
Your website is analysed by the Google crawler with the aim of finding valuable ads that match the context of your page. In this respect, you may be able to earn more advertising revenue with more 'valuable' keywords. The second criterion for ad quality, the personal interests of site visitors, can only be influenced indirectly.
Traffic
To really make money, you need a lot of traffic to your site. And since traffic from social networks is considered low-quality traffic by AdSense due to the often inappropriate search intent for advertisers, that means a lot of traffic from search engines.
Page RPM
Another factor is the page RPM (revenue per 1000 page views) you can achieve. This depends on the subject matter of your site. Is your site about keywords that are highly searched for and paid for by advertisers, or is it about a topic that has little commercial value?
The country of the target audience also has a big influence on the level of page RPM. In the US, the average is much higher than in India, for example. UK and Europe are in the middle.
The level of the average CPC also influences the page RPM and depends on how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click.
Click rate
The click-through rate also has a big impact on the result. Many of the factors that affect it cannot be controlled. For example, ads in specialised forums are less likely to be clicked on than pages with up-to-date technical information that the user visits with a clear search intent.
One exception is the placement of the ads. Although AdSense also offers a high degree of automation in ad placement, it should always be considered, checked and tested whether this suits your own site. On the other hand, such optimisation should not lead toinvalid traffic.
Volatility
For the sake of completeness, volatility should also be mentioned. Revenues are highly dependent on the following factors, which you cannot significantly influence
- Search engine traffic: A Google Core update that changes the ranking of your keywords has a direct impact on your revenue.
- Economic and seasonal trends: Advertiser budgets are an important factor in your success.
- Technology and legislation: Changes in the legal and technological environment are unpredictable.
In the 20 years of Google AdSense's existence, there have been many ups and downs in revenue development. As a result, revenues are always subject to change.
Revenue scenarios
Two fictitious examples show how high or low the income can be.
Scenario 1
You have a forum about puppies. You get a lot of traffic from social networkers who like the cute photos of the puppies, talk about them a lot and share other photos.
Values per month
- Page views: 100 000
- Impressions: 300 000
- Click-through rate: 0.5 per cent
- CPC (average): 0.05 Euro
This is 1500 clicks � 0.05 Euro. This equates to 75 EUR per month and a page RPM of 0.75 EUR/1000 page impressions.
Scenario 2
You have an info page about the latest developments of a specific 3D printer.
Values per month
- Page views: 10 000
- Impressions: 30 000
- Click-through rate: 2 per cent
- CPC (average): 0.25 Eur
This is 600 clicks � 0.25 Eur. This equates to 150 EUR per month and a page RPM of 15.00 EUR/1000 page impressions.
Conclusion
The two scenarios show that it is not easy to make big profits today. To estimate the values: A page RPM of 0.75 EUR is rather low and one of 15 EUR is very good. You can use theAdSense earnings calculator to work out your own scenarios.
Success can usually be achieved by continuously working on the website. But AdSenseoptimisationcan also increase your earnings.
I hope I have been able to give you a realistic idea of the opportunities and possibilities of monetising a website and wish you every success!
About the author
Michael Dilger-Hassel aka Milanex
Since 2011 I have been involved with all aspects of successful websites as a publisher and since 2015 I have been active in several support forums on the topic of AdSense and webmasters under the nickname 'Milanex'.
As a Google product expert 'Diamond', I have been supporting other publishers on a voluntary basis for years on all questions concerning Google AdSense.
In this blog, I take up questions from the forums and use my experience for tips and tricks. I present individual topics in detail and in depth to enable optimal use of AdSense.
To the vita
If you have any suggestions, comments or proposals for the blog post, please contact me bye-mail.I am happy to receive feedback!
