How Does Google Adsense Work?
You might be wondering how adsense works and how you can make money with it. I’ll og over how it works, how you can make money with it and how to drive your own website traffic.
Watch and learn in the video or read the text version:
I personally love adsense and it is one of the first monetization methods I’ll always throw on my websites when they start getting traffic.
Heres a screenshot that shows a glimpse of what’s possible in adsense, you can easily make $50 to $100 or more a day, and if your site has more traffic even more is possible.
The great thing about adsense is you can add other monetization methods onto your site even with adsense on it so it can simply be an income stream and doesn’t have to be a website’s only income stream.
If you have a website getting any type of traffic you can easily make money using adsense. Putting adsnese on your site is actually one of the easiest and most passive ways to monetize your website.
If you have a site getting traffic but don’t know how to monetize I’d recommend just putting adsense up and seeing what you get from it. Then you can work on adding monetization metnhds from there as well as testing other ad networks once you’re getting enough traffic and ad revenue.
I know I always talk about testing other ad networks and switching out ad networks to quickly 2X or more your site’s revenue, but I actually have sites that have the best RPM on adsense and a really good RPM on adsense. So that’s why I also talk about testing and that different niches perform better using different ad networks and that is something you can really only get a feel for through testing yourself which I encourage you to do.
Adsense and Site Traffic
To start making money on adsense you first have to have a website getting traffic from any type of source, so you can either use a website you already own, create a website or buy a website, and then make sure it is getting traffic to start making money from adsense. Once you start getting over 100 visitors a day, that’s when you’ll have enough traffic to start seeing if adsense will work well for your site.
I get most of my website traffic from organic google search, and I get some from social channels including Pinterest and Instagram, and some from my email lists, as well as some from direct traffic and other search engines as well as a few smaller traffic sources.
You can choose to drive traffic to your site using any method, and adsense will pay you for that traffic no matter how it gets to your site, unless you are trying to trick adsense and use bots or fake traffic then they not only will not pay you but will also ban your account so don’t try to game the system, simply figure out ways to drive real human traffic to your site to start getting paid by adsense.
How to Get Approved by Adsense
So once you have enough traffic you have to create an adsense account which you can do using your gmail and signing up at adsense.com.
Then you have to enter your website url to apply and adsense will look at it and then approve it or not approve it. I’ve never had a site not get approved by adsense and I have been rejected from other ad networks just never by adsense so I know they’re not too picky, but I know some people have been rejected by them so it does happen.
After submitting your URL you will get an email from adsense in a few days or weeks that tells you if your site was was approved or not. If you are approved you can create ads in the adsense platform, then copy the code from those ads.
How to Create Adsense Ads
I usually create responsive ads unless I have a specific placement in mind such as desktop sidebar which I will create a 300X600 pixel ad for sometimes. Simply create your ad, then copy the code and you can place it manually on your site, or you can install an ad plugin, I like to use ad inserter, and then you can simply paste the ad code into ad inserter on your WordPress site and then use their interface to choose where to display the ad whether that is on the top of the page, the middle, after an image. The bottom or wherever you want your ad to show.
Once you have a few ads, I’d recommend starting with one at the top of your page, one after your title or first image, and then one at the bottom of your page, and if your site has a sidebar try putting one or two in the sidebar. Then let them run for a few weeks and see how much adsense is paying you per pageview. For adsense for your website content ads you et 68% of the revenue and google gets the other 42% which is actually more generous than I originally thought as I looked up this stat just for this video, I had assumed it was closer to 50 50 but you actually get the vast majority of your site’s adsense revenue.
What is Adsense RPM?
After letting it run a few weeks you’ll have a good idea of your sites particular RPM for adsense, which means revenue per mille which means 1000 in latin so revenue per 1000 page views, and differs by niche and ad platform. It also varies by month and season and tends to peak near December as advertisers ramp up their holiday advertising budgets. At this point you can start adding more ads to your site including in page ads, adding more especially if you have longer content, and testing ad placement to see if that improves your revenue.
I’ll give you an RPM example so you can start to wrap your head around how much you can make per pageview.
Say your RPM is $5, that means you’ll be making $5 for every 1000 pageviews on your site.
To make $100 a day with a $5 RPM, you would need 20,000 pageviews a day, which could mean 10,000 visitors a day if each visitor viewed 2 pages on your site.
You can easily see how getting more pageviews per visitor can quickly ramp up your revenue, and this is why so many of those spammy news and celebrity sites make you click through to view every photo or page in a list because theyre trying to show an ad on every page and increase their pageviews to make more money.
I like to do this manually but you can also enable a testing feature within the adsense platform or use a third party tool such as Ezoic to test your ad placement.
Adsense also lets you see reports that include the RPM for different ad types including image vs text ads, and targeted or contextual ad types. It’s really great info so I suggest you dive into your reports and start seeing what factors influence your RPM.
I’ve turned image ads off on some sites and turned contextual targeting on and off based on RPM changes because sometimes you’ll be able to really increase your RPM by changing the type of ad that is shown. I’ve had image ads being shown thousands of times a day on one site and I saw the image ad RPM was less than half of the text ad RPM which was also being shown thousands of times a day. I turned off the image ads and my RPM went up around 25% it was a huge increase meaning my overall revenue also jumped by that amount, so it’s not trivial to test these things on your site as they can have a huge overall impact on your revenue.
Now that you know what adsense is, how to apply, how to put it on your site, how it pays you, what RPM is and how much you could start making each month, youre probably thinking, well this sounds great, but how do I start driving traffic to my website.
Drive more Traffic and Revenue to your Site
I’ll take you through a quick keyword research method that can help you start to drive more organic google and search engine traffic to your site.
First go to the google keyword planner, they have a free option that gives you keyword volume estimates, and an option that gives you exact estimates that you get access to when you run ads on the google ad platform. You can start with the free version if you don’t currently run ads on google because it will still give you a general keyword volume idea.
Chooser the keyword idea tab when you login then Type in your keyword ideas at the top with a comma separating each one, and you’ll get a list of the keywords alongside the average google monthly search volume for each keyword.
Ignore the competition section because that is only ad competition not organic search competition so it doesn’t affect your organic keyword research.
I actually didn’t know this when I first started doing SEO research because id been in the paid ad world for so long and luckily I got coffee with an SEO person right after I started doing more SEO and they explained this to me so I was able to correct my mistake early on luckily.
You can look at the top of page bid section however to get an idea for RPMs for the keywords you’re thinking about writing. If the RPM is high, meaning a few dollars or more, then it means you’ll be able to make more money on adsense for that particular piece of content, so it’s a good metric to at least look at, but I never base content decisions off of RPM because at the end of the day getting traffic, even low RPM traffic is the most important thing.
Think of it this way, if you have a super low RPM but you’re getting a million visits a day, you’ll be making a lot of money, and if you are targeting super high RPM keywords but you’re getting zero visitors a day, you will be making zero dollars a day aka no money. So for me traffic is a million more times important than RPM when I do keyword research.
Doing this volume portion of keyword research will help you figure out if a keyword has any search volume at all and if it is worth writing an article about.
I tend to write articles around keywords even if they only have 100 or so monthly search volume because you can start ranking for long tail keywords around the main terms and higher volume keywords are more competitive to rank for.
The tricky part is keywords with high search volumes is often many other high authority sites have already published articles around these keywords and are already ranking for them. If you try to do the same with a new or low authority site youll likely not even have a chance to rank for it.
Once you have a list of medium to high volume keywords you want to rank for, you can look at the existing sites ranking for those keywords by going to google and typing in your keyword. I use the Moz chrome extension to see how competitive each keyword is and if my site has a chance then I will write the article around the keyword.
Moz shows you the domain authority and page authority of each site when you use its extension so to figure out if you can rank for the keyword you simply look at your own sites authority and see if you are at or above the authority of the currently ranking sites. If your site has a chance then you should add that keyword to your list and write the article.
This is a quick way to start doing keyword research for your site which will help drive more organic traffic so you can start making money with adsense.
If you want me to make a video that goes deeper into keyword research and how to format pages to rank in organic search and all things SEO let me know with a comment below and if I get enough comments about that Ill consider making one for you guys!
How do you currently get traffic to your site? Let me know in the comments because I love hearing how others do it and getting new ideas.