What is Google AdSense and How to Make Money With It?

There are many ways to monetize your website traffic, and most of them are related to advertising third-party products or services to your website visitors. There are many advertising programs that can help you earn money nowadays, but the most popular is Google AdSense.

This advertising program was launched in mid2003 by Google and is currently the most popular advertising program on the Internet. It provides a good opportunity for webmasters and site owners to monetize their traffic - every year, Google pays over $10 billion to its publishers. If you’ve asked yourself, ‘What is AdSense, and how do I make money with AdSense?’ the following article will give you some hints.

The Advantages of Google AdSense

• A huge number of publishers and advertisers. As of today, over 10 million websites are using it.
• High level of security, safety, and transparency for both advertisers and publishers. This is another good feature of AdSense. Google acts as an intermediary between the two sides and is mindful of the whole process being transparent and clear for everyone. All the necessary metrics can be tracked within your Google Analytics account.
• Variety of ad formats. In AdSense, advertisers can run text, images, HTML ads, video ads, and much more, and in many different sizes. As a publisher, you can experiment with different ad types and figure out which ones drive the most revenue.

Tip: check which sizes are the most used by other publishers and learn from them. For example, in our own study, based on the analysis of over 63,000 advertisers and publishers, we found out that the most popular ad sizes are 728x90 and 300x250:

How Does AdSense Work?

The whole process is quite simple. You create an AdSense account, insert a small amount of code into your website pages – and that’s all you need to start. Google will display targeted ads on your page that are either relevant to the content of your website or to users’ previous searches, based on its proprietary algorithms.

Your website visitors will start clicking those ads and - the best part - you will be paid for it. Google AdSense works on a cost-per-click and revenue-sharing basis. This means that your main task will be to provide as many clicks to those ads as possible.

Tip: do not try to cheat Google and artificially increase the number of clicks. Do not encourage your website visitors to click ads and - of course - do not click your own ads under any circumstances! Google has a very accurate and complicated system for preventing click fraud. Once it notices some suspicious activity on your website or has any doubts about the quality of your traffic and clicks, it may suspend your account.

How Much Can You Earn With AdSense?

Google charges advertisers per ad click. Publishers get 68% of the click amount (or 51% when it comes to AdSense for search).

The commission you get depends heavily on the competition and CPC in the niche. In practice, the commission per click can range from $0.20 to $15. The majority of niches bring less than $3 per click to publishers. However, there are some niches that can be extremely profitable.

There are two ways to discover the most profitable topics:

1. Estimate an average cost per click in the niche with the CPC Map tool:

You can see that the three most expensive niches in the US are Insurance, Online Education and Marketing & Advertising. If you are just about to start a blog and choosing the topics to cover, these numbers will be extremely useful for you.

2. Check the CPC of a particular keyword in the Keyword Magic tool:

Tip: the amount you earn doesn’t solely depend on the cost per click value in your niche. It also depends on how ads match your audience's interests, where the ads are located on the page, etc. So pay attention to the content of your website, its look, and feel, and test different placements within a page to find the most efficient option.

Traffic Is The King

Finally, and most importantly, your earnings also depend on the amount of targeted traffic to your website. You can choose the most expensive niche and pick the best placements for your ads, but it doesn’t make sense if nobody comes to your website or blog. Keep in mind that only a very small number of your visitors will click the ads (there are no official statistics from Google, but usually webmasters report that 1% to 2% is quite a good CTR). Most probably, the clicks will bring you less than $1 per click. Now you can calculate how much traffic you need to earn the amount you want. Therefore, if you want to make money with AdSense you should have large volumes of traffic. This will require a lot of work and a lot of unique and quality content.

This means that it is always reasonable to create a website on a topic you know a great deal about. It will be much easier for you to generate a lot of quality content and this work will be pleasurable. Do not expect to make $1,000 per month with a 10-page website. It is recommended to create at least 20-30 pages of content before you start working with AdSense.

Summary

Briefly summarizing, you can make pretty good money with Google AdSense, but it is not a program where you can get rich quickly. There are some common-sense rules to follow that will help you lay the groundwork for high and stable earnings:

• Love the topic you are writing about and know a lot about it.
• As well as producing unique and relevant content, do it on a regular basis to make Google aware that your website is being updated constantly with fresh information.
• Do not try to cheat Google with any kind of “artificial” clicks.
• Do some research to find the most profitable niches in terms of CPC and search demand. Build your content plan according to these insights.

This will help you to get a lot of traffic and monetize it with AdSense.