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! ;)
Ever since AdBlock was released in 2010 more and more internet users have started using it virtually blocking all internet ads.
These people claim ads that were shown to them were intrusive, annoying, even scary sometimes when the ads literally could read their minds and showed them offers on that new camera they wanted to buy but hadn’t told anyone yet (except Google of course, but that doesn’t count, still creepy). I’m guessing the real trouble would’ve come when it wasn’t cameras they were searching for…
It was obvious to all webmasters whose websites rely entirely or partly on advertising that we were losing some business because of users using AdBlock, but it was incredibly hard to estimate how much was actually being lost, until recently in 2013 PageFair launched allowing any webmaster to place a little tracking code on their website to learn how many of our users were actually not seeing our ads.
In my case, for an architecture website with content in Spanish, English and French and roughly 10K visits per day its 16%. 16% of people who visit the site are blocking ads and there for producing cero revenue. This numbers has grown by 2 points in just a month and one can only expect it will keep growing, which means soon enough we won’t make enough to keep generating new content (for free) and at one point maybe not even enough to keep our servers going, which means the site will go down and users will have to go and find their content elsewhere.
I do agree some website’s ads are intrusive and annoying, but to be honest when they are it’s because you are looking at arguably illegal websites anyways such as torrent downloads or similar. 98% of legal, decent, serious websites who rely on ads to survive actually show them in a very reasonable non-intrusive way.
Just a thought, we’ll see were this ends. I’ll keep updating if that 16% changes significantly.
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