If you are familiar with Google Adsense you’ll probably agree it’s one of the best options to monetize your web unless you want to go into selling ads yourself. At least that’s what I’ve been told and I do agree so far.
But still, the way Google Adsense pays you is mysterious… they pay you per click, but those clicks are sold in bids, so their price changes base on demand, which means at the end of the day you have no idea how much you’ll make, even if you can predict your traffic accurately.
So here is my theory on how Adsense works. My guess is Google somehow analyzes your website and puts you into some kind “cluster” which determinates how much you’ll make. Hopefully they will review your website every so often and change you from one cluster to another if needed.
Why do I say this?
Well, I’ve been showing Adsense on some of my websites for quite some time now, and even though my traffic is growing steady my Adsense income isn’t, it is growing, but it seems to grow in “steps”. For a certain period of time my website will generate X dollars per day +-10%, until one day suddenly it will move on to generating Y dollars per day +-10% and stay there for a while until there is a new “cluster” change.
It’s funny to see how revenue is X on a Wednesday (the day with more traffic within the week) and will still be X on Saturday (the day with less traffic). My RPM during the weekend will go up, and then down during the week, whatever it takes to keep the final revenue near X. I was even more suspicious when one day my website went down for 6 hours and guess what? I still made X that day!
I’m not complaining, I make some good money from Adsense and I’ll keep using it, I just thought the theory was worth sharing for those of you who are trying to figure out the magic recipe for Adsense success! ;)
I guess this is a tricky question to answer because only right answer is “it depends”. It depends on your niche, it depends on the language your content is write in, etc. etc.
That being said what I can answer is; for an architectural website with content in Spanish, English and French, which country pays the most using Adsense? This is just a very specific example, but it’s the only true data I can provide to even try to get close to the generic question that titles this post.
So here is the ranking by CPC:
- United States – 0,59€
- Austraila – 0,53€
- Canada – 0,48€
- Switzerland – 0,37€
- United Kingdom – 0,35€
Slightly different if sorted by RPM:
- Australia – 4,54€
- United States – 3,44€
- Canada – 2,96€
- Switzerland – 2,51€
- United Kingdom – 2,03€
This data is for November 2013