How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make $100,000
With Google AdSense
by MAHESH MOHAN on APRIL
28, 2014
Is it really possible to make $100,000 a year
from Google AdSense (or by selling ads on your
website/blog)? If so, then the real question is how much traffic do you really
need to make big bucks with Google AdSense? While it’s true that we
can’t predict the Google AdSense income exactly, we can optimize the ads in
different ways so as to make the most out of it.
Also, you must make sure that your website
category is advertising friendly because your AdSense income depends a lot upon
the category of your website. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to find out the
competition in your industry. If there is enough competition (i.e. if the
suggested bid by AdWords for keywords in your niche is high) then we can assume
that Google will fill your ad spaces with high paying ads (see how AdSense works).
For example, if you Google search “loans”
then you’ll see a lot of ads so it means that if you have a blog related to
personal finance then there will be enough competition for your ad space. Now
I’ve randomly added few keywords to Keyword Planner to find out its suggested
bid by AdWords. Here they are:
As you can see, the competition for keywords
related to “finance” is very high compared to keywords related to “food”. Of
course, the suggested bid is just an estimate and the real cost-per-click
varies a lot. But still, even if it’s $5 then it means a lot. Why? It’s because
the cost per click to advertise on Google is very high compared to cost per
click on Google Display Network. So if an advertiser is paying $0.50/click on
Google then he may be paying only $0.10/click on Google Display Network.
How Much Traffic Do You
Need To Make Money With AdSense?
Let’s say you want to make $100,000 a year
from Google AdSense and/or Google AdSense alternatives.
$100,000 divided by 365 = $274 a day.
So, you have to create either: 274 pages that
earn $1 a day OR 548 pages that earn 50 cents a day OR 1,096 pages that earn 25
cents a day (which sounds reasonable, right?). Let’s say you have 1,096 high
quality blog posts and you earn $0.25 per click from AdSense.
I have analyzed the traffic and AdSense stats
(using Google Image Search) of several websites including my own blogs
and websites.
From my analysis, I found that the average Page
CTRis around 1% (or it’s something that we can achieve easily). But it
really depends upon your niche, web site design and other factors.
In fact I have achieved a Page CTR of over
20% in 2007 for a niche website and was making $100+ a day from Google AdSense
alone.
Let’s Do The Math To Make
$100,000 A Year With Google AdSense
Let’s assume that you have a Page CTR
of 1% and your average CPC is $0.25 (I believe
it’s quite an achievable target unless your keywords have no advertiser
competition – e.g. a recipe blog).
Some of the top paying AdSense niches are
Finance, Internet Marketing, Technology, Web Hosting, Internet & Computers,
Software, Health etc. and some of the lowest paying AdSense niches are
Entertainment, Arts, Movies, Celebrity Gossips, News blog, Jokes, Wallpapers,
Quotes, Recipes, Photo blogs etc.
As mentioned earlier $100,000 a year means
you have to earn $274 a day. If your average CPC is $0.25 then you need
100,000/0.25 = 400,000 clicks a year (or approximately 1,000 clicks a day) to
earn $100,000 a year from Google AdSense. Assuming that your Page CTR is 1% you
need approximately 100,000 page views a day. Now, let’s say your “Bounce Rate”
(it is the estimated percentage of visits to your website that consist of a
single page view) is 100%. It means that you need 100,000 unique visitors a
day itself to generate 100,000 page views a day.
In a nutshell, you need 100,000 visitors a
day to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense alone (with a CTR of
1% and CPC of $0.25).
Google AdSense Glossary
Page Views
A page view is what Google counts in your
reports every time a user views a page displaying Google ads. We will count one
page view regardless of the number of ads displayed on that page.
For example, if you have a page displaying
three ad units and it is viewed twice, you will generate two page views.
Clicks
For standard content ads, Google counts a
click when a user clicks on an ad.
For link units, Google counts a click when a
user clicks on an ad on the page of ads, after selecting a link in the link unit.
Page Click Through Rate (Page CTR)
The Page Click Through Rate (CTR) is the
number of ad clicks divided by the number of impressions or page views that you
have received.
Page CTR = Clicks / Page Views
For example, if you received 5 Clicks from
100 Page Views, then your Page CTR would be 5%. (5/100*100=5%)
Cost Per Click (CPC)
The Cost Per Click (CPC) is the amount you
earn each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC for any ad is determined by
the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than
others, depending on what they’re advertising.
Page Revenue Per Thousand Impressions (Page
RPM)
Page Revenue Per Thousand Impressions (RPM)
is calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page views
you received, then multiplying by 1000.
Page RPM = (Estimated Earnings / Number of
Page Views) * 1,000
For example, if you earned an estimated $0.15
from 25 page views, then your page RPM would equal ($0.15 / 25) * 1000, or
$6.00.
Estimated Earnings
Your account balance (or earnings) for the
time period selected.
Source: Google AdSense Glossary
But you are not using AdSense alone to
monetize your website, right? You can make more money by selling direct banner
ads, in-text ads, CPM ads, sponsored links, affiliate marketing, etc.
Cost Per Impression (CPM)
Ads
So let’s say you’re selling direct banner ads
and is also selling CPM advertising which is again an effective way to monetize
your website.
What are CPM ads?
CPM (Cost Per Mille) stands for Cost Per
1,000 Impressions. CPM networks pays for every 1,000 impressions you generate.
If a CPM ad network is paying you $1 CPM then it means that they’re paying you
$1 for every 1,000 page views you generate.
CPM Network earnings totally depend upon your
traffic quality but you can expect anywhere between $1 – $3 per 1,000
impressions. So, if you generate 100,000 page views a day then you can make
$100 – $300 a day from CPM Networks. Again, you can earn $100 – $300 (or maybe
even more) a day by selling banner ads directly to advertisers.
Now, you can split the traffic into three as
you’re earning $300 each from 3 advertising networks. It means that you need
100,000/3=33,333 unique visitors a day (with a bounce rate of 100%) to make
approximately $274/day.
Again, if you have an authority blog then
your bounce rate will never be 100%. In that case you can expect an average
page view of 1.5 per user. It means that 50% of your visitors exit from the
landing page and others visit more than one page on your website.
All in all, you need approximately 20,000
visitors a day to generate 30,000+ page views and it can earn $274 a day which
translates to $100,000 a year in advertising revenues. Need a little more help
reaching that $100,000/year goal? Add commissions from Affiliate Programsas well into the
equation and you can hit that $100,000 goal with much less traffic. In fact, in
2008 I was averaging $200+ a day from less than 200 daily unique visitors with
affiliate marketing. It was possible because when it comes to affiliate
marketing it’s all about traffic quality and not traffic quantity.
How To Optimize Google
AdSense
You can optimize your AdSense ads in several
ways. For example, you can try text ads only, image ads only, text & image
ads to find out which ad format is performing better. Google recommends wide ad
formats like 728 x 90, 336 x 280, 300 x 250, and 160 x 600 as they’re more
advertiser friendly.
When you use the recommended ad formats, your
AdSense ads should perform well because of increased competition. How? The
recommended ad formats by AdSense are the most popular ad formats and hence
almost all advertisers must be targeting those ad formats. So it increases the
competition naturally and Google will be showing the highest paying ads on your
website.
But it’s also a good idea to try different ad
formats as Google is now offering a variety of ad formats (including responsive ad units). I would recommend A/B testing on your website to find out the best
performing ad formats. Like, you can do A/B testing by trying different ad
types, ad formats, ad colors, and then by placing your ads at different
sections on your website (above and below the fold) to find out which position
is offering the best CTR).
But what if your AdSense earnings are low
even though you have good a CTR? In that case, I would recommend ad controls
though Google mentioned that blocking
any ad will reduce our potential earnings.
Google says:
It’s a myth that filtering ads can prevent
‘low-paying ads’ from appearing, so as always, we recommend blocking only those
ads that you feel are unsuitable for your users.
Finally, you can tweak the AdSense
click-through-rate by using an AdSense friendly template for your website/blog.
But make sure that your website is not ad heavy as it will impact the user
experience in a negative way. And as always, you can focus on creating awesome content and driving more traffic so that it
increases your Google AdSense earnings (and your advertising revenues)
naturally.
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