Google Adsense Revenue

Many webmasters trying to make a decent living off Google adsense revenue know little to nothing about something called “smart pricing.”

While some people brush it off as no big deal people who have been making a substantial amount of adsense income for years know otherwise.

For those people out of the loop having an adsense account that is smart priced means enough un-targeted clicks have come from your sites to warrant an account wide discount or fire sale.

What this means is that for a certain period of time every click, whether highly valid or not, make you fraction of what it should.

Google does this to protect their advertisers.  These companies are spending hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars every single month on adwords and they are expecting to get targeted visitors from these clicks who will buy their products, services, or sign up for something (like a newsletter).

If an advertiser is paying for valid clicks and not getting them it will only be a matter of time before he quits advertising this way.  So Google, trying to make sure their advertisers stay happy, will discount clicks for them that are not targeted and therefore not producing anything.

Oh course, not every click from your website is going to lead to a sell.

But a good portion of them should, or some kind of action, and if they do not then your account will be smart priced.

How do you know if your Google adsense revenue is being minimized by smart pricing?

1. Go to the keyword tool and check what an average click for a keyword should cost an advertiser.
2. Take that number and multiply it by 25%

That number is a rough average of what you should get for every valid click coming from your website.  I have seen really good clicks get 200% more than that but that number will most likely be your average earning per click.

If you are not getting anywhere near that than your account is smart priced and you are making a fraction of the adsense revenue you could be potentially making.

What can you do about being smart priced?

Keep in mind that one bad performing website can bring down the earnings from all your other good ones.  Knowing this you need to find out which ones they are and take the adsense ads off them.

I am going to tell you know that getting valid clicks on a daily basis takes organic traffic from Google.  The further you get away from that model the more low quality (from a Google adsense revenue standpoint) your visitors will be.

Traffic from Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, and other popular social media sites are terrible!  Direct traffic is no good as well.

Hubpages and Squidoo are great adsense revenue generators by themselves but are not good for traffic.

Here the equation to go by:

Targeted traffic from Google = valid clicks

Targeted traffic from Bing = somewhat valid clicks

Targeted traffic from Yahoo = barely valid clicks but passable

Traffic from anywhere else= an adsense account that is or will be smart priced

Look at your stats from your Statcounter or Google Analytics and check where the majority of the visitors are coming from.  If you are not getting the right amount of traffic then you need to take the adsense ads off of it.

Once you do this you will notice a major increase of income.  It could go up as much as 300%-500%

There are a lot of little quirks to making great Google adsense revenue.

This is one of them.  If you feel overwhelmed do not worry.   It will take time to learn all of the ends of outs of this form of internet marketing.

I firmly believe it helps when you look at things from Google’s advertisers standpoint instead of your own.  It will help you understand why the big “G” does what it does.

Also keep in mind this (I was talking to several SEO guys about this yesterday in the break room).

Yahoo and MSN got lazy in the late 90s and early 2000s.  This is the reason why they each went from owning the entire market share to becoming 2nd and 3rd minor fiddles to Google.

By 2002 their results had become quite spammy and their advertisers were not getting the targeted traffic like they had before.

The big “G” not only came up with better quality search results but a better advertising system. And in their system webmasters are held accountable for the traffic they are sending to advertisers.

And, they are determined to protect this at all costs.

Google wants to keep their searchers happy and they want to keep their advertisers happy.  If you can help this corporation to accomplish both tasks (not one or the other) then you will make a lot of money.

This is one of the main keys to making a lot of adsense revenue.

If you need more informatio about the subject here is an excellent article from Courtney Tuttle about preventing your account from being smart priced.