Is it really possible to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense (or by selling ads on your website/blog)? If so, how much traffic do you really need to make big bucks with Google AdSense?
How Much Traffic Do You Really Need To Make Money With AdSense?
Let’s say you want to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense and/or Google AdSense alternatives.
Read: 20+ Google AdSense Alternatives You Probably Don’t Know
$100,000 divided by 365 = $274 a day.
So, you have to create either: 274 pages which earns $1 a day OR 548 pages which earns 50 cents a day OR 1096 pages which earns 25 cents a day (which sounds reasonable, right?). Let’s say you have 1,096 high quality blogposts and you earn $0.25 per click from AdSense.
I have analyzed the traffic and AdSense stats (using Google Image Search) of several websites including my own blogs and websites.
Read: How To Find The Traffic Of (Almost) Any Website
From my analysis, I found that the average Page CTR is around 1%. But it really depends upon your niche, web site design and other factors. In fact I have achieved a Page CTR of over 20% in 2007 for a niche website and was making $100+ a day from Google AdSense alone.
Google AdSense Glossary
Page Views
A page view is what Google counts in your reports every time a user views a page displaying Google ads. We will count one page view regardless of the number of ads displayed on that page.
For example, if you have a page displaying three ad units and it is viewed twice, you will generate two page views.
Clicks
For standard content ads, Google count a click when a user clicks on an ad.
For link units, Google count a click when a user clicks on an ad on the page of ads, after selecting a link in the link unit.
Page Click Through Rate (Page CTR)
The Page Click Through Rate (CTR) is the number of ad clicks divided by the number of impressions or page views that you have received.
Page CTR = Clicks / Page Views
For example, if you received 5 Clicks from 100 Page Views, then your Page CTR would be 5%. (5/100*100=5%)
Cost Per Click (CPC)
The Cost Per Click (CPC) is the amount you earn each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC for any ad is determined by the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than others, depending on what they’re advertising.
Page Revenue Per Thousand Impressions (Page RPM)
Page Revenue Per Thousand Impressions (RPM) is calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page views you received, then multiplying by 1000.
Page RPM = (Estimated Earnings / Number of Page Views) * 1,000
For example, if you earned an estimated $0.15 from 25 page views, then your page RPM would equal ($0.15 / 25) * 1000, or $6.00.
Estimated Earnings
Your account balance (or earnings) for the time period selected.
Source: Google AdSense Help
You can increase the Page CTR by using one of those high CTR WordPress Theme for Google AdSense. But I really wouldn’t recommend those WordPress themes as it will impact the user experience very negatively. Instead, you can focus on creating awesome content and driving more traffic so that it increases your Google AdSense earnings (or advertising revenues) naturally.
Now, let’s assume that you have a Page CTR of 1% and your average CPC is $0.25 (I believe it’s a quite achievable target unless your keywords have no advertiser competition – e.g. a recipe blog).
Some of the top paying AdSense niches are Finance, Internet Marketing, Technology, Web Hosting, Internet & Computers, Software, Health etc. and some of the lowest paying AdSense niches are Entertainment, Arts, Movies, Celebrity Gossips, News blog, Jokes, Wallpapers, Quotes, Recipes, Photo blogs etc.
So, You Want To Make $100,000 A Year With Google AdSense, Right?
As mentioned earlier $100,000 a year means you have to earn $274 a day. If your average CPC is $0.25 then you need 100,000/0.25 = 400,000 clicks a year (or approximately 1,000 clicks a day) to earn $100,000 a year from Google AdSense. Assuming that your Page CTR is 1% you need approximately 100,000 page views a day. Now, let’s say your “Bounce Rate” (it is the estimated percentage of visits to your website that consist of a single page view) is 100%. It means that you need 100,000 unique visitors a day itself to generate 100,000 page views a day.
In a nutshell, you need 100,000 visitors a day to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense alone (with a CTR of 1% and CPC of $0.25).
But you are not using AdSense alone to monetize your website. Right? Let’s say you’re selling banner ads directly and is also selling CPM advertising which is an effective way to monetize your website.
Read: CPM Alternatives To Google AdSense
What are CPM ads?
CPM (Cost Per Mille) stands for Cost Per 1,000 Impressions. CPM networks pays for every 1,000 impressions you generate. If a CPM ad network is paying you $1 CPM then it means that they’re paying you $1 for every 1,000 page views you generate.
CPM Network earnings total depend upon your traffic quality but you can expect anywhere between $1 – $3 per 1,000 impressions. So, if you generate 100,000 page views a day then you can make $100 – $300 a day from CPM Networks. Again, you can earn $100 – $300 (or maybe even more) a day by selling banner ads directly to advertisers.
Now, you can split the traffic into three as you’re earning $300 each from 3 advertising networks. It means that you need 100,000/3=33,333 unique visitors a day (with a bounce rate of 100%) to make approximately $274/day.
Again, if you have an authority blog then your bounce rate will never be 100%. In that case you can expect an average page view of 1.5 per user. It means that 50% of your visitors exits from the landing page and others visit more than one page from your website.
All in all, you need approximately 20,000 visitors a day to generate 30,000+ page views and it can earn $274 a day which translates to $100,000 a year in advertising revenues. Need a little more help reaching that $100,000/year goal? Add commissions from Affiliate Programs as well into the equation and you can hit that $100,000 goal with much less traffic. In fact, in 2008 I was averaging $200+ a day from less than 200 daily unique visitors with affiliate marketing. It was possible because when it comes to affiliate marketing it’s all about traffic quality and not traffic quantity.
ohh its very useful for this thank you
Dude you have analyzed very deeply. I appreciate your work and efforts to provide a very useful review of Adsense earnings.
Thank you so much! :)
Hi Mahesh,
Great post! I appreciate the way you presented a complicated subject in a simplified and interesting manner.
Thanks.
Hey,
Thanks Nandita! And welcome to Minterest. :)
- Mahesh
Thank you for your information. I have a question. Can you give me an example of a webpage or blog that gets more than 100 000 visitors a day to earn $100 000 a year? At which point or time can you expect this amount? Thankful for any answer!
You don’t need 100,000 visitors a day to earn $100,000 a year. You need approx. 20,000 visitors a day to generate 30,000+ page views and it can earn $274 a day which translates to $100,000 a year in advertising revenues.
Okay, thank you very much for your answer. But what website drives a traffic with more than 20, 000 Visitors per day? Is there anyone? Please reply. Thankful for any answer.
Yes, http://www.labnol.org (a technology blog) receives over 20,000 unique visitors a day and is earning $1,000+ a day. There are so many blogs out there that receives 20,000+ uniques a day.
You can find the traffic of almost any quality site here http://www.minterest.com/how-to-find-the-traffic-of-a-website/
wow, you definitely have given some hope to aspiring bloggers. That’s a detailed analysis of adsense and it would undoubtedly help in achieving one’s financial target! Thanks!
Very useful article to understand the in-depth theory of online earning.
Wow..amazing article…it will be a long journey and stay focus to earn $100.000/ year.
Very well described thanks for this article
I started blogging on blogspot six months back now it has approximate 2850 viewer a day. i m using Blueadvertiser CPM ad services but i earned $5 only by now. how can i moneteze my blog. what is my future scope of earning by seeing current number of viewers?
If you got 2850 pageviews a day go for AdSense or a CPM banner network.
Was just doing the same math this morning and have roughly the same analysis. In the personal finance area, its reasonable to estimate clickthrough of 0.5% – 1.2% and RPM of $2 to $8. Pages per user would range from 1 – 2.5. Of course if you can get the $8 per thousand pages and are getting 2.5 pages per user, every user is worth 2.5*$8/1000 or 2 cents. Then you have to figure out how much content, links, SEO is going to get you to 5MM visits in a year!
Hi,
thanks for the information was going through with all the comments and found to put one to clarify my doubts
When you say visitors – you speak about unique ?
i started my blog in the month of may 2012 initiated with 800 pageviews and growing to 15000 page views this month but my total earning is only around 3 to 4 $ i also have some other affiliates ads but that is based on sale i also added traffic revenue ads but that too is on CPM
Can you help me out onto the same – how i can enhance my revenue
i don’t expect 100000$ a year but my expectation is aroun 100 $ per month since it’s all about patience
Your comments are welcome -
thanks
Sabrin
Yes.. Visitors = Unique Visitors… But when counting page views I considered bounce rates as well. To expect $100 a month you probably need 1,000 unique visitors a day (organic traffic and not social media or referral). That’s 30,000 page views (with 100% bounce rate) and CTR of 1% and CPC of $0.33.
Hope this helps..
Thanks!
can you advise me suitable advertiser for my p0rn blog site, having 4000 pageviews a day; as google rejected my request it being adult content.
pls help me out i want to monetize my blog
Hello,
I think adbrite supports adult sites. Check it out…
Adsense is the expensive ads at this momment, but sometimes it makes me really confussed.
what possibility to earn with my adult blogspot blog, it has currently 5000-5500 pageviews mostly from direct search engine. tell me in detail
Hi Mahesh,
You know me. :p Well, wow! You’ve put in a lot of efforts for this in-depth analysis. Im not from a s/w field. I usually don’t read such articles but this one just kept me going. I understood very little, though. This is sure gonna help people like me, who don’t understand such technical words.
I know this is really awkward to ask and I should be asking this, but do you think can anyone earn ( No, certainly not 100,000/yr but maybe +/-$100 – &200 per year. ) through Google AdSense without the knowledge of blogging skills?
Keep writing. Luck!! :)
Yes, you can! Bloggers blog what they learned, came across etc. they blog out of passion… so as long as you’re passionate about what you’re writing its not a problem… and you’re revenue will only go upwards and not downwards… $100 to $200 a year requires 100 (approx) visitors per day.
When I meant earning $100 – 200 per year, without blogging skills, I meant, like, without writing skills. I mean,… You know what I mean.
Yeah… I know.. it is still possible as long as you’re passionate about what you’re blogging. If you don’t have blogging skills or writing skills then you need to write something original… something which can’t be find elsewhere on the Internet.
Start here http://www.minterest.com/the-bloggers-handbook/
Thanks for the reply. I’ll check this link later. :)
Hey, I had a good adsense income in May..they adjusted and reduced the amount and later issued a cheque..and then they again keep making adjustments every month..and in turn make my adsense balance more and more negative..And they are still making those ‘Other- Adjustments’ ! What do I do ? And how to solve this ?
Hi,
I’m not sure if I got your query. You referring to the “Estimated earnings” you see on homepage and the “Earnings” you see on the payments page?
If so then it’s absolutely normal… they do adjust every month end… but its all about how much difference its showing. If the percentage change is less than 5% then you need not worry if its more than 5% then there’s something wrong and I need more info.
Thanks!
Hi,
I have a blog @blogspot, with appox. 5000 pageviews a day, recently i had my own domain name, and i still use blogger@ blogspot as hoting page but what problem i facing is pageviews declined suddenly from 5500 to less than 1000 a day. why? and how can i overcome this issue?
Possibly the site was penalized by Google. Check the date of recent algorithm updates by Google and see if you noticed the sudden drop in pageviews after that.
Or else it must be temporary…
Great Post. This is exactly what I was looking for. This gives me a much better and realistic traffic goal for my website.
Nice post . Adsense is the best
I have more than three blog sites. last year I have earned 100 $ within year but this year even though there is 100% ctr but I have earned nothing.
can you guide me?
100% CTR? Can you be more specific? I’m a bit confused… Or use the contact form if it involves private info.
Thanks!
what is actually contact form i.e you have given in reply
( use the contact form if it involves private info)
I said if you want to give more info then you can use the contact me form at http://www.minterest.com/contact/.
Thanks!
wow!great post..i`m thinking its a dream but we may succeed .But it was hard to start with adsense
I’m getting around 25k pageviews per day to my adsense ads but only getting around 100 clicks. That’s less than 0.50% CTR. That’s very low in my opinion. What would you recommend for that?
The CTR depends upon several factors. I suggest you to modify the theme and make it AdSense friendly. And again, if your bounce rate is very low then it means that visitors come back often. Those regular traffic (and social media traffic) converts rarely.
very useful information thanks for sharing.
Great post Mahesh. I’ve was looking through via google for how much traffic is needed to generate a steady income. I came to the right place.
Thanks for that and stay tuned as I’m in process of writing a similar article focusing on “traffic” and not income.
On my site Yapmouth I get 697,317 hits and 543,258 page views and 40,000 new visitor a month and 400,000 spam bots, worms, I finally put stats and ads on my site. I going to be rich!
Hi,
Very interesting stuff…I have a few questions..
Suppose my website has 10 pages with 1 single same ad (google adsense) on each of the pages… And, a single visitor visits all 10 pages on Day1. So, how much impression would that be counted as?? Also, if that same visitor visits the site everyday, would it still be added in the impressions count? or is it just counted as 1.
Thanks :)
They will be counted as individual Page Views. If you’re showing 3 ad units within a page then it will be counted as one page view only but if a user visits another page then it will be counted as two.
Thanks!
thank you…. so the more pages a visitor visits, the better it is for the owner , right??
And, what would happen if the same visitor visits the same page after 10 days.. that’ll be added to page views??
Yes. When your visitors visit more pages on your website it will increase the page views and also it improves the ‘bounce rate’ of your website too.
If the same visitor visits the same page after 10 days it again means another page view and it will be counted as another unique visit.
Hi Mahesh,
I really like your analysis and I think we share the same thought.
This is the reason why I just bought a wordpress plugin that can mass upload 100′s of articles for a certain niche and the plugin automatically schedules each of my articles for posting according to my settings.
My plan is to make 100-200 blogs for different niches in 3 months time and monetize all by using adsense and other ppc ads.
Do you think I’ll be able to reach the $100,000 mark in 1 year with my plan?
Thanks.
Lester
Hi,
Just because you have 1000s of content doesn’t mean that you’re going to hit six-figure. You need quality content and quality traffic too. The above math is based on organic traffic for a good niche.
Thanks!
detalied post but i am surprised as it looks impossible to earn that much money at least from adsense. As you said average ctr is 1% and you need 30k plus visits to earn + $100. Getting traffic is really a big issue. But by the way, thanks for sharing.
Yeah.. this is not a How To get traffic post… it wont work… but it will surely help you to reach a goal. ‘Coz 1% CTR is not difficult at all especially if your niche is competitive and also based on demad. :)
i am gong to start a website i am pretty confidence that i vl get 6000 visits how much can i get frm cpm
It depends on your niche… Anyways for your U.S. traffic you should get at least $2 per 1,000 page views.
Hi,
That was great content you have shared , its really valuable ,all your explaination is fair enough and i like the way you have explained.
Thanks once again for sharing the information.
Anytime! :)
So mathematical,but well explained, thank you for your great work…
Anytime! :)
Mathematical formula is very attractive. Bit difficult to get more that much difficult. needed more hard work for that place
my blogs 2000 views per day & my adsense income is ~ $2 per day , is it ok ..?
I think About 2000 unique visitors are required per day to get your target income from adsense in a year. Even with affiliate marketing, I think it is difficult to earn $200 a day from just 200 visitors.
With affiliate marketing you can’t predict the income as it depends upon your traffic quality. I managed to make $300/day with just 100 unique visitors a day in 2007-08. So it’s quite possible…