How Google Adsense Works? – Lets Understand the Basics to Earn More with Adsense

Google Adsense is one of the hassle-free way to make money online. But, to get a stable income from Adsense, you need good traffic, well optimization and more than that, the basic understanding of it. I’m sharing here my personal understanding of how Google AdSense works, so you can get to know the real fact behind it.  This is completely from my personal understanding and experience.

I get few emails and comments about less earning from AdSense, mainly the low CPC. No matter how good traffic and CTR they have, but the final earning is still less because of less CPC.

You must understand the basic process behind Google AdSense, such as how it works, from where Google gets money, why CPC is not stable and how others are making more money than you with less traffic.

Google AdSense is Google’s advertising program for publishers and webmasters who can make money by showing ads on their websites/blogs. It’s a PPC (Pay Per Click) program which pay you when someone (genuine click from genuine reader!) click the ads on you site. Each click may pay you differently depending on how much the particular advertiser is paying to Google.

Google Adwords is another part of same Google advertising program which works for advertisers who want to advertise through Google. So, basically Google Adsense shows ads on your site, which are received from advertisers through Google Adwords.

I found an very informative infographic shows the process of Google Adwords. Even though, it shows how Adwords works, but you will get some good ideas of Adsense too, because both are directly connected.

what-is-google-adwords

Infographic original source

 

What We Can Take From Above infographic

 

These are the points I can list out to understand the basics which helps on increasing your AdSense earnings.

1) You need to write about a topic which is having several products to sell by several companies. So, the competition among advertisers will be high. This fact directly influences the CPC.

If I’m writing about ‘best webhosting providers’, I know there are plenty of companies in market, specifically to sell their products. So, I’m predicting the high competition which means higher CPC ads on my blog.

If you are writing about ‘Free mp3 download’ or ‘Indian college exam results’ on your blog, Yes, you may receive good traffic, but you will not find higher CPC ads. Just think ! , which American or European country company will bid (pay more to Google Adwords) to show their ads on ‘Indian college exam result’ websites?, the answer will be “ No one “. Even I doubt Indian colleges will be interested on Adwords ads.

 

2) Write for Advertisers, Get some Targeted Visitors

Think in this way. You need more money (higher CPC) and advertisers want your readers to buy their products. If I’m an advertiser, I do not mind to pay $2 per click, if I can sell a product which can make $60 profit within your 10 visitors (10 clicks). So, at the end, my net profit is $40 ( $60 – [10 x $2]). It can be done by targeted visitors only.  Google is not only caring about publishers you and me, but also they are more concerned on their advertisers.

If your site is getting 100 clicks but none of the advertisers are getting expected benefits, then I’m sure it will reduce the quality score of your website ( I’m guessing this). So, next time AdSense will push lower CPC ads.

 

3) Traffic Country Location

It’s not mentioned in above infographic, but I want to mention it here. Most of the advertisers bid more on specific countries only where they can sell products online. As you know, our online buying rate is lessor than USA or Europe countries or Australia.

Even though you are targeting valuable keywords to get higher CPC ads, but if the traffic is not coming specific countries, the final CPC and earning will be less.

Look at my December 2011 AdSense earning report. Even though Page Views from India is in second place compared to other three countries, but the CPC and final earning is very less. CTR is almost same in all countries. But the CPC in India is 6 times lessor than USA and other countries.  This could be a good example of how traffic country location is important.

earning countrywise

 

If you have read this article up to here including the infographic thoroughly, I’m sure you would have understood the mistakes on your website and why it is not making good money with AdSense. You can increase the final earning by increasing the CTR and traffic, but if the CPC is very low, then you have no point in doing them.

Just understand these basic points and keep them on your mind while writing your next post. Look at the full process in single picture, do not only think about you as a publisher to make more money with AdSense. Try to understand how it works, what Google is doing behind it, how ads are filtered and displayed and what advertisers are wanting from your readers.

I hope this post would be useful. Let me know what mistakes and lessons you realized after reading this article!. Please do not share your exact figures of CTR, CPC and RPM of AdSense, its against Adsense TOS.

A part-time blogger who makes enough money to leave the full-time job, but still enjoying both jobs :) . Sharing the knowledge here to help everyone to build better blog and make money online.

  • Thanks Dinesh! Very informative. Btw, did something happen with contextweb that you know of? since yesterday contextweb website hasnt been working properly and so is the ads.

    • @Ray,
      You got it.
      Yes, their selling dashboard is not working.
      This is the mail I received yesterday (21-01),

      Dear PulsePoint Publisher,
      Please be advised that we experienced a service outage today. We now have ad serving restored, although the PulsePoint Selling Desk portal is currently unavailable.
      Our tech teams are working diligently to restore access to the portal and we will follow up with you once completed.
      Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
      The PulsePoint Publisher Team

      But I’m not sure how it affected the ad serving. We can only know after getting the dashboard access.

    • Thanks Rahul.
      I have not done anything specifically to target US readers. Even it set for global users in Google webmaster tools. But, what ever I write, it get more readers from US, and I rarely write anything about specific country readers/topic/news.

  • Thank you Dinesh for sharing all this useful information.
    I have a 2 question :
    Where most of your traffic come, and do you use any pay program to drive traffic to your blogs !
    or you just let Google do the thing.

    • @Zouhir,
      My top traffic source is Google. I’m not using any pay program to drive traffic. Pay traffic programs will not work very well for blogs, it is suitable for sales pages only (my personal opinion)

  • Hi Dinesh,
    I found your site by doing a search on adsense. I have been optimizing adsense on my site and playing around with ad units, contextual vs interest based and also custom channels. My traffic is around 300 daily visitors and from one of your posts that I read I would need around 3000 a day to reach higher income goals.

  • Hello Dinesh. You are quite an inspiration for people wanting to be like you. Lets face it, everyone would like to earn more through their adsense. I know I don`t earn as much as you, but through careful changes to my website and adding a some of the large squares and medium rectangles I have increase my earnings by about 100%.

    To all those thinking they have done as much as they can already, NEVER GIVE UP, as its always possible to squeeze just a little more out of adsense.

    Nice website Dinesh, I`ll be sure to keep reading more and more.

    • @Jonathan,
      You are 100% correct. There is no end in trying something new on Adsense to increase the earning. What ever you do, keep a track on what you are doing, so it will be helpful to revert back.
      Thanks for reading my blog.

  • Finally! A sensible post explaining Google AdSense, written by someone just like us. There are too many posts out that don’t have the real perspective that yours does, Dinesh, so thank you!

  • Thanks for explaining the Adsense basics to visitors. I am sure these will be helpful to lots of potential users willing to give it a shot as a part-time or sometimes even full-time income!

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