The hot news around these couple of days is the revelation by Google Adsense over the amount that Adsense is paying their publishers for the clicks they get on their Adsense Ads. Google has always been tight-lipped over this until this post that was published two days ago. So now the world knows, bringing the stop to all speculations and wagging tongues.
Just in case there are some who are still hibernating in their caves, part of the revelation reads like this.
AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites.
We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations.
So now that we know, will this information be of any help in making us more from Adsense? It depends on how you approach Adsense as a blog or site monetization method.
Google Adword Keyword Tool Does Not Always Show The True Figure.
When we do our keyword research using the keyword Tool, we look for a few things before deciding on what keywords are best suited and have the potential to earn the most. The first thing we go for of course is the search volume, then we check the search results to see the competition we face. Common sense will tell you that the higher the search volume and the lower the search result will be the ideal situation. That is the basic information we depend on before proceeding to other factors.
For those depending on earning from Adsense, the other thing that they pay attention to is the Cost Per Click. The higher the CPC of a keyword the better. Before Adsense revealed their payment structure, MMO gurus takes 60 – 40 as a rough guide. Which means Adsense takes 60 while you get 40. Some place it higher. some lower, but Adsense is always the evil guy who takes more. Now that we know exactly, we can base our decision on facts.
Basically speaking, if the CPC in the Keyword Tool shows $1.00 for a certain keyword, we should be effectively getting 68 cents per click if we have a blog that receive hits for those keywords. This is where all the misunderstanding and whining about low paying clicks starts.
Understand Adwords First
You should understand that when an Advertiser runs an Adword campaign, there are two things that he needs to specify for his campaign. One is how you want his Ads to be displayed and the other is the keywords that triggers that display. We shall call the first one the Displayed Keyword and the next, Actual Keywords.
The Displayed Keywords determines the success of the campaign. Advertisers will do his research to find out which are the keywords that receives the most clicks. He will then try to coin up something along that line or simply just use the exact phrase because somehow, people gets interested when they see such a phrase. Suffice to say, the Advsertiser hopes for as many clicks as possible for his campaigns.
With that part decided, he then must look for the Actual Keywords which will trigger those Ads that displays his eye catching Keywords. These are the keywords he will be bidding and paying for. He will want targeted or buying traffic so naturally he will be going for keywords that people will use when they are searching to buy or spend money over.
A simple example. If he is starting a site selling shoes, he will want traffic who are shoe buyers. Then after getting that traffic, he must ensure the shoe buyers clicks his ads to land on his site (re: the displayed keywords). This way, he will get the highest ROI. To ensure that his Ads appear on the top most position, he will have to make a good bid for those keywords.
Lets say he is willing to pay Google $1.00 for the Actual Keywords he is using to trigger those Ads, then it is those keywords that we will have to nail exactly (that is what he is paying for) in order to earn the full 68 cents from Google. Otherwise, it will be Ads of lower value displaying. These can be ads from Advertisers who are paying 10 cents per click but with almost similar or broadbase keywords. Thus you get your 6 cents clicks and believe me, many prefers to pay 10 cents.
(Keep in mind that Adwords is an advanced education and I just have the primary level of it)
Triggering The Highest Paying Ads In Your Post
Since every human thinks on a different wavelength, it is tough to nail what exactly Advertisers would use for their Adword campaign. There are of course Adsense connoisseurs who has developed such a good instinct that they periodically can predict the right keywords to use.
Those with this talent stands to earn a lot more than the plain Joe and Jane like you and me. They will be able to write post with the keywords that Advertisers are actually using to trigger the highest paying ones. Now say again that his blog is about shoes and he has much Search traffic interested in shoes coming daily. If he can predict the exact keywords that the Advertisers of the online shoe store is using, he can include those keywords in his blogs to trigger those $1.00 Ads.
But trust me, it only sounds easy on paper.. or in blogging about it. The best and easiest way, get tons of traffic, never mind those 5 cents clicks and let the sheer volume of traffic cover up for any losses.
I am using it on another site, where I am just a writer, but I get to use my own adsense code.
Apparently the site’s traffic is very responsive to ads I have 2 banners 300×250 and for 2 weeks now I have got 6,500 impressing 4.27% CTR with 283 clicks and a profit of 46.67$
While this is not a lot, from the numbers you can understand that the traffic, the ad colors and the keywords are the correct ones.
The only problem is site ranking in Serps and the low traffic. When you think about it, since I have 2 banners this makes it around 8% click per user.. which i think it’s wicket percentage.
USA clicks pay about 1.20$, unfortunately most of them ain’t US
Anyways I wanted to point out what Costa said: Huge traffic makes up for all mistakes!
Make that huge “targeted traffic”. Social traffic sucks for Adsesne.
It really is all about the right kind of traffic, and lots of it. I recently changed from search only to showing it to everyone because of a problem with the search code. I have sufficiently run off enough social visitors (and dofollow blog hunters) where I don’t have to worry about it. The CTR is a bit lower, hovering around 2%, but CTR doesn’t really matter. What really matters is search conversion. If most of your clicks are “search and click” then you’ll never get smart-priced.
I had to do SOMETHING. I watched my earnings drop from over $20 per day to under $10 per day and that wasn’t going to cut it. I’ve only had the change in effect for less than a day, but I can say that my revenue went back up above $20 for that particular day.
As I am not a very sociable guy, I don’t face that kind of problem here as 90% of my traffic here are organic. However for posts that gets more than the rest, I insert another block in the middle showing only to search traffic.
Thanks for diving further into this, I was only able to quickly look over the revenue % released recently.
It would make a lot of sense about the ad being the exact keyword because it always seems like you should be getting a larger click but unfortunately snagging those 5c clicks instead.
I don’t think there is anyone who can pinpoint the exact keywords that pays the highest. So we can only cast the net and hope we catch one or two in the process.