Income from AdSense

A common question people ask about AdSense is how much income from Adsense can I earn from my website or blog and what is the average income from AdSense. Giving a figure for the average income from AdSense would be misleading because of the wide range of types of sites but working out the potential income for a site once you know the typical number of visitors and the niche that the website or blog is in isn't difficult.

Let's look first at how you might work out what potential income from AdSense that a site might get.  The most important measure first of all is knowing what the typical number of visitors per day is to the site.

So let's assume for the moment that your blog or website attracts 100 visitors a day and that each visitor only views one page. This makes the maths very simple - we can now work out that the number of impressions per day is 100. ( Note that you can do this the other way round as well - if you know the impressions and the number of unique visitors then it is easy to work out the typical page views per visitor).

Ok so we are now at stage one in working out our typical income from AdSense for this site. 

The second step is to know how many of these impressions will typically result in a click on an AdSense advertisement. Advertisers used to get clickthrough rates ( CTR) on their ads of 3% and beyond but these rates have been dropping for some years as visitors have become ad-blind and ad-averse.  If we assume that you site isn't all ads but that it is fairly well optimised re ad placement then let's assume you get a click through rate of 1%.

So in working out your income from AdSense we now know that for every 100 page impressions you can expect about 1 click on a AdSense advert.

All we need now is to work out how much we get per click and we know what the income from AdSense will be for the website - right? Well yes and no. Three are  so many different niches and they don't all cost advertisers the same for their ads and as a result the money you get per click can vary widely between differentt niches.
Lets assume for the moment that you are in a niche were you are attracting ads that pay on average 10 cents per click.

If you serve 100 page impressions you can therefore expect an income of around 10 cents per day based on these figures.

This gives us pointers to key things that you need to do to improve your income from AdSense.

Increase the number of visitors to your site
Increase the number of pages seen per visitor
Find ways to increase the likelihood that people will click the ads ( increase click through rate or CTR)
Make sure your blog or niche is attracting well paying ads - by using content that triggers the best paying ads
Find a good niche

None of this is rocket science but it does take dedication and hard work to increase your income from AdSense to levels where you are getting a substantial income. It can be done though - thousands of webmasters and bloggers have made a great income from AdSense and there is no reason that you cant do it to.



One more thing - Many people stumble with Adsense and either earn very little or end up getting banned. If this happens to you then try one of the many other programs available for earning income from advertising. Look out some of the other posts on this blog where you will find information about different programs.

Banned from Adsense and Adwords - Don't be!

Banning of Adsense and Adwords accounts happens all the time and it's worth taking the time to carefully read the terms of service and policies for both programs. If you are at all serious about delivering good content, advertising it and monetising that content then your Adsense and Adwords accounts will be valuable to you. There are other companies you can go with. Indeed it is sensible not to put all your eggs in one basket. But for most serious webmasters AdSense and Adwords are core programs.

There has been a recent spate of Adwords users getting banned who have had previous warnings or who have in some way infringed the program policies. The bans are lifetime bans so you should take this seriously.

It's not clear what has triggered this particular wave of bans - there may be some users who have in the past engaged in arbitrage practices with AdSense. Most of the banned people simply got a letter saying they had broken the program policies and that they were banned for life.

So here's a tip - if you haven't recently checked that your site, it's content and your ads all comply with the AdSense and AdWords program policies then do it now. Don't wait until you get a goodbye e-mail from Google.

Is Adsense or Affiliate Marketing best for you

If you have a blog or website and you are wanting income from adverts to generate online income then which is best for you - AdSense or Affiliate marketing? The space on your pages is valuable and limited and so this is an important question.

AdSense is the most popular of the Pay Per Click advertising programs that are available. You will see AdSense ads on all sorts of Websites and blogs. There is a good reason for this - AdSense is easy to sign up for and easy to use and most importantly it is very easy to generate a steady stream of small scale income from AdSense.

To make a good income from AdSense though you really do need to get lots of people visiting your site. The amount that you get paid for each click is generally not very high and so you need lots of readers and lots of page views if you are aiming for a good income.

There are a number of ways of improving your performance with AdSense. One is to ensure that your site content is well focused and that the ads that AdSense is delivering are as high paying as possible for the niche within which you are operating.

At first sight it would seem that AdSense wins the AdSense versus Affiliate marketing competition hands down. But things are not that simple.

With Affiliate marketing you will get paid usually only when someone actually purchases the product that you are promoting. This is a much rarer occurrence than someone just clicking an advert out of curiosity.

On the plus side however you will find that the amounts that you are paid for a successful affiliate sale are much much higher than your standard payment per click through AdSense. If you target your site content very closely to your affiliate offers then you can considerably improve the percentage of people who come to your site looking for just the offers that you are promoting. It doesn't take many such sales for you to start making substantially more than you would with AdSense.

So is there a winner? Well not really. You must think carefully about how you match the advertising content of your site to the sites content. In many cases the best way to go is to use a combination of Pay Per Click advertising and Affiliate marketing. You may even be able to sell advertising space directly on your site.

Only careful monitoring and targeting of your content and the advertising on your site will produce good online income. AdSense and Affiliate programs therefore both have an important role to play in generating the maximum income from your website or blog.

Put AdSense code in a Blogspot Blog

This is basic but it is something that many newbies scratch their heads about when they first get a blog and an AdSense account so here is a walk through on how to put AdSense into your blogspot blog.

First things first. You must have already signed up for a blogspot blog and have some posts on it with some reasonable content. Then you will have signed and been approved for AdSense. In AdSense you will have generated some AdSense code and now you are ready to put it into your blog. OK?


Well first of all you don't actually need to get the code from your AdSense log in.

There is a gadget that you can use in blogger that makes all this very easy. Go to the layout tab in your blog editor. Then look for the "page elements tab". You now see the layout of your blog in graphic form.

Click Add gadget and then look in the list for the AdSense gadget. Click on the + sign and a page comes up as shown in the picture. Choose the format ( size ) of the add that you want and the colors. If you haven't already linked your AdSense account you will need to give your identifying information and thats it. You save the gadget and make sure you have dragged it to somewhere on the page layout where there is room for the ad size that you have selected.

If you want to generate the code in your actual adsense account then you can also do it another way. Simply get the code then add a HTML gadget on your page elements page. When the HTML gadget is open paste the code into it. Save the gadget and you ads will show.

AdSense allows use with other contextual Ads

This is a reminder for AdSense users who may not have noticed the change that Google has updated its competetive Ads policies. The policy was previously very explicit that ads from other contextual ads programs could not be displayed on pages which were displaying Google AdSense contextual advertising.

Its not clear what prompted this change but the policy has been amended and now allows contextual Ads from other programs to be displayed on the same pages as Google AdSense ads providing that the other ads are displayed in a way which ensures that they are visually distinct and diferent in look and feel from the AdSense ads.

This relaxation of the AdSense policies is a welcome change for AdSense publishers and means that they have more flexibility about the way they monetize their sites.

Adsense results disappoint and publishers worry

In an earlier post I raised the question as to whether the recent turbulence in the stock markets might be a taste of trouble ahead for Adsense publishers. I also noted in my last post that some AdSense users had been reporting drops in AdSense income in recent months. These issues now seem to be coming together with clearer signs of a slowdown in growth at Google following disappointing profit reports for its most recent quarter ending December 2007.

Google's profits were up 17% to $1.21bn (£608m) for the final quarter of 2007 but analysts had been hoping for stronger profit growth and Googles shares fell sharply in after hours trading.

Google's shares have suffered a fall of more than 18% this year due to concerns that the slowing US economy will cause advertisers to cut back spending. The latest results show that Google is not immune to a US economic slowdown.

Google has so often reported very strong profit growth that investors have become used to this and so they are disappointed with the recent results. Google in this sense is a victim of it's own past success. Google's sales for the quarter for example were $3.39bn, a 52% rise - but this failed to impress.

Given the tightening of the economy in the US and worldwide seemeingly endless rising performance can only be squeezed further as advertisers make hard decisions about advertising budgets in a climate where consumer spending is likely to tighten.

Publishers are likely to feel the effects of all this and further reports of publishers finding that their AdSense income has reduced are likely.

AdSense Issues Verification and Income

Time to catch up on some issues with AdSense. Those with accounts who haven't yet been through the verification process on their accounts will notice that Google has changed the trigger level for sending out PIN's.

Google has two ways to check that the physical address given for the AdSense account is correct. The first is that they send out a PIN in a postcard to the address which then has to be verified back into the account. The second is telephoning the phone number given in the account. Google used to send out the PIN once the AdSense account had accrued $50 but this has been dropped to $10 so new AdSense users will go through this verification process much sooner than previous sign ups did.

A more significant issue with AdSense is the fact that there appear to be many users reporting drops in their AdSense income over the last month or so. There is speculation that this may be due to Smartpricing which reduces the cost per click and is linked to the quality of clicks. Some AdSense users have experimented with reducing their AdSense exposure to try to deal with this.

Typically these were publishers who were deploying AdSense across a range of sites of varying quality. What they have been doing is removing the ADSense from the lower quality sites. Smartpricing is account wide not site targeted so increasing the average quality of clicks ( ie user actions ) should possibly counteract SmartPricing. Although these publishers may get fewer clicks as a result the payment per click should go up on the the quality sites that the AdSense is left on. This should more than compensate - or so the theory goes. I havent yet seen definitive evidence that this aproach works though.