How To Increase Your AdSense Per-Click Payout

March 5, 2010

A member of my new combined forums posted a question regarding their AdSense earnings the other day. In summary, he said that he was only earning about 7 cents per click from AdSense for ads targeting keywords that the AdWords Keyword Tool says cost around $4.25USD per click. He didn't understand why.

This member is not alone! Many times I've heard the story of people who did the keyword research and found great "high paying" keywords only to earn pennies on the dollar compared to the AdWords estimates.

There are two primary reasons, in my experience, why this happens. They are:

REASON #1: AdWords Pricing Is NOT The Same As AdSense Pricing

The price you're seeing in the AdWords Keyword Tool is the estimated cost for a click on Google's search results (AdWords). But the price that advertisers are willing to pay for clicks via AdSense is typically much less (A click may be worth $4.25 on search but only $0.07 via AdSense). There are two reasons for this.

1. A visitor via a search query is highly targeted and typically far more ready to buy than a web site visitor.

Think about it. If somebody goes to Google and searches for "Texas life insurance quote" it's pretty obvious they're ready to buy some life insurance in the state of Texas!

But if somebody reads a news article about some life insurance scam happening in Texas, and the site owner uses AdSense to monetize the site, it's very possible that ads for life insurance in Texas will appear on the page. Out of curiosity the visitor clicks the link. Was that visitor worth $4.25? Probably not.

That example is fairly extreme, but you can see how a visitor on a web page is often far less primed to buy than a Google searcher entering clearly commercial keywords.

That's not the only reason AdSense values are less though. Unfortunately, there's a darker reason as well.

2. Click fraud drives the actual value of clicks from the AdSense network down.

There are huge networks of bogus "clickers" who are hoping to get a payday at the expense of AdWords advertisers. Although Google works hard to prevent such clicks from being charged to the advertiser, it's impossible to prevent them all. I've read estimates across the board, from 10% to 33% of AdSense clicks being fraudulent.

How big the problem really is is anybody's guess, but AdWords advertisers have learned to keep the price they pay via AdSense (the "content network") much lower than their Google search bids.

For advertisers it's just a matter of return on investment (ROI). Lower ROI for the advertiser means lower payouts per click for AdSense publishers, whether the lower ROI is due to the less-targeted nature of your traffic or due to the prevalence of fraud.

REASON #2: Google Has "SmartPriced" Your Site

The second reason you will sometimes see a dramatic difference in earnings per-click is that Google has "SmartPriced" your site. "Smart" Pricing is Google's way of estimating how valuable the click-throughs coming from your site are to advertisers. If they feel your clicks are very valuable, you'll earn a higher amount per click. This is determined (in part) by conversions tracked by the advertisers, and by other guestimations made by Google about the traffic they receive from you.

There are two schools of thought about "Smart" Pricing. The one school says it's a joke to try and determine how valuable traffic is without having access to 100% of the conversion data from advertisers (and the majority don't share that data with Google). The other side says that Google has to try and do something or advertisers will just go away and there will be no AdSense network at all. I tend to lean toward the first school of thought, but then I'm a much bigger AdSense publisher than I am an AdWords advertiser.

There's pretty much nothing you can do about the AdWords versus AdSense bid difference, but you have some control over "Smart" Pricing. Here are a couple of ways to keep Google's valuation of your site higher:

1. Don't send junk traffic to your site.

When I say "junk traffic" I mean traffic from sites that advertise "Get 1 million visitors for $10!" and from buying ads on low-quality networks that are full of fraud. A rule of thumb is this: if the traffic doesn't convert visitors into sales for a salesletter that's known to perform well with Google traffic or AdWords, it's junk traffic and should be not be used to earn from AdSense.

2. I've found that the more my traffic comes directly from Google for searches related to the advertisement, the higher my payout per click is.

For example, if your AdSense-monetized page is about electric motor scooters, and the ad that gets clicked is about electric motor scooters, and the traffic you're getting is from Google's search results for "electric motor scooters", then your payout will generally be a lot higher.

Google tracks this transaction from search to click, so they know when the clicks come from their own traffic. Google understandably trusts their own search traffic more than any other and so are willing to pay more for clicks from their own results. They assume it's "quality" and will convert better for the advertiser (which is probably true).

So try to focus on getting traffic from Google to generate revenue from AdSense. Don't be surprised if it takes Google a few weeks or even two months to figure out they need to increase your payout per click, though. "Smart" Pricing isn't an instantaneous thing.

Does that mean you can't earn good AdSense money from other traffic sources? Of course not! Just don't expect Google to value the clicks as highly and payout as much as clicks originating from their search engine. If what you're doing is working, keep at it, but the more your traffic comes from Google the closer your click-values will generally be to what the AdWords tool says.

Please click here to discuss this post at the forum.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under AdSense, Blog | 101 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog.

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!

Niche site case study 2 year update.

November 20, 2009

Back in August of 2007 I decided to perform a case study by building a small, 10 page niche content site from scratch and see how well it performed over time. The prime purpose of that case study was to prove that my 3WayLinks.net network was a powerful way to get sites ranked in Google — and keep them there.

It's been a little over two years since I created that case study, and I thought you might be interested in knowing how things are going with that little content site. Yes, it's still up and running. Yes, it's still well ranked in Google. Yes, it's still making money. No, I haven't done any additional work to keep it ranked.

As a recap, here's what I did:

I did some research and discovered a niche in the fitness market that I felt was ripe for the picking (today I use Niche Horde for that–it's a lot easier).
I used my Instant Article Wizard software to create 10 unique articles that would make up the site content.
I submitted an additional 10 articles to EzineArticles.com so that each of the inner pages would have a few links to it.
I added the site to my 3WayLinks.net network to grow the backlinks to it.

When I setup this site, there were some dissenters. "Oh yeah," they said, "it does well right now, but Almighty Google is going to catch on and deindex the site, just you wait!"

Well, that's dissenters for you. Over two years later, here's my latest AdSense report from that little niche site that sits untouched, happily generating income for me month after month:

If you were around when I did the original case study, then you might recall that my goal for the site was $3 a day, or about $1,000 a year. As you can see from last month's AdSense revenue, the site is doing much better than that. It actually earned over $7 a day — more than twice my original goal.

But was that a fluke? How has the site done overall? Here's the total 26 month report:

Yup, this little 10 page site (which doesn't look very professional, btw, and only took about 5 hours to create) is about to hit the $5,000 earnings mark. That means that the site has earned, on average, $6 a day since I first created it — twice my goal. It also means the site will soon have earned me $1,000 for each hour of work I put into it.

It has required no extra work on my part, with one small exception: I had a 3-day server outage in January of last year that caused the site to drop out of the Google rankings until I installed a blog and threw up some fresh, relevant content for a couple of weeks. That would not ordinarily be required, but since the site disappeared for three days Google wanted some affirmation that it was not dead and gone, and fresh content was the ticket to get the rankings restored.

I just can't emphasize enough how many people threw up contrary opinions, proclaiming how the Google Deity in its all-knowing wisdom and power would discover and neutralize my 3WayLinks.net network. And yet the site still ranks #4 and #5 for its primary and secondary keyword phrases, and has done so consistently for the last two years — and it is not alone, not by a long shot. 3WayLinks is more powerful than ever since I've continually made improvements to the way the network builds and maintains links to your site.

You may not be able to live off of $5,000 in two years, but imagine building 50 or 100 successful sites like this one (certainly possible considering it only took five hours to begin with). Even if you could only spare 10 hours a week, that's two sites a week, or more than 100 sites a year. Even if you could only reach my original $3 per day per site goal, that's $300 a day, which comes to over 100,000 powerful reasons each year to start building content sites and putting them into 3WayLinks.net.

Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, AdSense, Blog | 80 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!

How I got 46 page-one rankings in Google in 7 days.

September 29, 2009

I'm going to keep this post short and sweet. The bottom line is that I've got 46 sites ranking in the top 10 Google results for their primary keywords — and it only took me 7 days to achieve it.

How did I do it? Simple:

1. Research low-competition keywords that get between 1,000 and 3,000 searches in Google per month.

You want to target "low hanging fruit" for this method, so look for long-tail keywords that the AdWords Keyword Tool says get between 1k and 3k searches per month.

2. Make sure the top 10 currently ranking sites are mostly inner pages from big sites like Amazon.com or EzineArticles.com etc.

If most of the top 10 pages are inner pages with few links to them, then the pages are being ranked based on the site authority rather than the page itself. That means it's pretty easy to rank for those terms.

3. Register an exact-match .COM, .NET or .ORG domain name.

For instance, if the keywords are "small green widgets", then I register smallgreenwidgets.com or smallgreenwidgets.net or smallgreenwidgets.org. No dashes in the name, and no .info or .biz etc. domain names — only .com, .net and .org. Google gives a nice boost to sites whose domain name exactly matches the search query.

4. Create a small 5 page site around the content of the primary keywords plus 4 related keywords.

Nothing fancy required. Just about 300-500 words of content per page centered around the keywords for each page. I also have a site map, privacy policy and contact us page on each site.

5. The Magic Bullet: Get links to the new site from 1WayLinks.net.

I submit an article to my 1WayLinks.net network and have the article posted on 30-50 blogs in the network. The posts spread slowly, at an average rate of about 5 per day. The article I submit has absolutely nothing to do with the keywords I'm trying to rank the site for. It just has a small "about the author" paragraph that links out to the new domain.

I "spin" the links in the linking paragraph so that 50% of the links use the keywords I want the site to rank for as the link text, and 50% of the links use the domain name itself. Since each post in 1WayLinks.net can have up to 3 links in it, I spin the second and third link so that each of the additional 4 pages gets some links aimed at them as well.

The links from 1WayLinks.net are very powerful, especially since I've made some major improvements to how well (and how fast) each post in the 1WL network gets discovered and indexed by Google. I'm getting a lot of feedback from current users saying their Google rankings are on the rise thanks to these new improvements.

In 7 days of using and repeating this simple, four-step process, I now have 46 sites ranked in the top 10 Google results for their primary keywords. Each day more of the sites I've built come into the top rankings, and the ranking of the other sites continue to improve as more links get spread across the 1WL network and Google includes those links into its ranking algorithm.

Based on the results I'm seeing so far, I'm on track to build an AdSense network that earns at least $5,000 a month starting in October. That's right, in just six weeks I expect to have an additional $5k per month in my AdSense account using this method. Not bad 'eh?

Thanks to this simple method backed by links from 1WayLinks.net, it's possible to build a nice AdSense income fast.

Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, AdSense, Blog | 178 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!