Optimizing for AdSense – Traffic

Here’s one mistake newbie domainers, webmasters and bloggers fall into. Most would usually think it’s enough to set up a few websites or blogs, put up some content, slap on Google AdSense ads, and sit back and relax. But does the money come flowing in? Well, in a way, yes. Ad revenues come trickling in, but it would be very minimal. That’s because AdSense revenue is very much dependent on traffic.

There are two ways of earning well from being an AdSense publisher,

1. Very high traffic on a single site.
2. High traffic distributed over several (or many) sites with moderate or low traffic each.

As we earlier suggested, you should diversify your web holdings if you intend to earn well from Google AdSense. One website or blog would only earn you so much, unless it’s a very popular website that gets tons of traffic.

So in line with our earlier suggestion to diversify, you are more likely to earn well from AdSense if you set up many sites with different, targeted content. You would expect to initially earn a very little amount from each site, especiall since your clickthroughs would only be about 1% of your total traffic. And each clickthrough would earn you anywhere from 2 cents to an average of about two dollars (unless it’s a high-cost keyword topic).

In our example, say you have a website that gets 100,000 pageviews per day, then you would get 1,000 clicks on average. Let’s say each click averages at 1 dollar, then you get $1,000 at the end of the day, or $30,000 at the end of the month for that one site alone.

In comparison, let’s say you run 10 sites that each get 10,000 pageviews per day. So each site would get about 100 clicks per day, totalling to 1,000 clicks in all. If each click gets you one dollar, then you get the same $1,000 per day or $30,000 per month.

Now imagine if each site grows traffic up to the 100,000 daily pageviews of the first example. You’d ideally be earning $300,000 per month.

Of course this is all theoretical and just estimated figures. And to tell you the truth, getting a hundred thousand pageviews per day is already a big feat, unless you’re an experienced web marketer.

However, the point is that if you are just starting, it would be good to already set up as many sites as you want early on. Even considering the initial and recurring costs of domain names, hosting and even paying for content and site design (or doing it yourself), the returns would be better once your traffic grows. It’s even better this way since you will be able to better target your websites to niche audiences, which is usually favored in terms of clickthrough rates and cost-per-click.