Adsense – Statistics Differences between a High & Low Revenue Adsense Site?
”Just do something…”, now that sounds easy enough, and is just common sense right? Well I happen to just love statistics but sometimes the best way to maximize Adsense revenue is to “just do something” and avoid falling into the trap of excessive statistic “watching”.
Adssense Stats
If you run any Adsense sites you must know what I’m talking about. Checking your Adsense account twice a day to see how much money you’ve earned, and letting those good or bad days define your mood isn’t productive and won’t change things. If you are thinking — twice a day, that isn’t so bad then you have to realize that I’m lying about the twice a day thing– and I really don’t know the real number of times it was.
If you really want to earn money while sleeping, or while you are at the beach then it takes some action. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some of those beautiful statistics.
High Revenue vs Low Revenue Adsense Sites – useless but interesting statistics
The first statistic I find interesting and common between high and low revenue Adsense blogs is the browser used by the visitor. There is a significant difference in the browser used in high vs low revenue blog sites. Which browsers do you think are associated with higher revenue Adsense sites?
I probably would have guessed IE or Safari because in my opinion they are used by less technical readers. And one common truth is that high-tech readers are “ad blind”, they don’t see the ads and are able to filter them out of the content as useless whereas the non-technical visitors tend to view the ads and content as the same thing. This is a generalization, but the idea is backed by plenty of evidence.
Low Revenue/Earnings Adsense Site Statistics
IE, Firefox & Chrome are the majority browser for visitors to DisplacedGuy.com, and this blog is my lowest Adsense Revenue earning blog sites it doesn’t even come close to making enough money to cover the hosting costs, and it is somewhat of a bandwidth hog compared to other sites I run. From a purely business perspective– this would be the first site I should consider shutting-down but it has personal meaning to me. I’ve met people here, gotten job referrals, and just learned a lot so I will probably never shut it down.
Less than one person in 1,000 click an ad on this site and the Adsense cost per click (CPC) is very low, in the ten or twenty cent range.
Before we dig into the browser stats for my high revenue Adsense sites lets talk about how to measure a successful Adsense site.
Revenue per mile (RPM) – Great universal measurement for rating success of an Adsense site
What is considered a “good” RPM for a profitable Adsense site? This answer depends on the person, but generally speaking a profitable niche site does between $3 and $10 RPM with some super-niche sites doing far better. Over time your idea of a successful site will change.
I’ve got about two years of sporadic experience with Adsense and my perceptions of a successful site have changed many times. Also, when reading your RPM you need to look at averages over a period of time, at least 30 days because anything less will be unreliable due to daily fluctuations.
- Under $1 RPM is not worth the effort, if the site is hogging your bandwidth consider shutting it down, it is a weight holding you down.
- Above $1 RPM is a respectable site for a beginner, and has potential for being a decent earner with work. I still keep sites above $1 RPM but eventually I will sell them or shut them down and focus on the high revenue sites.
- Above $3 RPM is a decent site with potential and worth putting extra effort into maximizing profit. Once you get here you have usually been messing with Adsense sites for a year and have learned many of the hard lessons.
- Above $5 RPM are good solid sites that if you should put time into maximizing profit. $5 RPM for an Adsense blog is my target for a quick-setup, low effort blog site. If you can repeat it on a regular basis and maximize some of them to $10, $15 or $10 RPM then you’ve got real potential of saying goodbye to your boss in five or ten years– and making a fair living too (e.g. in six figures).
- Above $10 RPM are the Crème de la Crème sites that you should strive for. Successful by most standards and if there are ways of creating these on a regular basis I am definitely not aware of them and would be very thankful if you’d share some secrets if you know the answer.
A few disclaimers about my opinions above. A site needs at least six months time and sometimes more before you can tell for sure if it will be successful, and the first month or two the traffic can be very spotty, this is normal. Success to one person might be failure to another, so to give you a feeling on where my reference point is — in my career I am used to mid six figures and consider that average. I am probably considered “white trash” to the elite of America.
As you can see, I run AdSense on three blogs including a niche blog. The Page RPM values for me vary from 3 to 5 at the moment – from a blogger at dollarshower.com
As you can see from Page RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) column, United States is the highest paying Page RPM country in my top 10 estimated earnings. – source SPBlogger.com Top Ten best paying country in Google Adsense
High Revenue/Earnings Adsense Site Statistics
IE, Safari & Android are the majority browser for visitors to one of my higher revenue Adsense sites. The difference between the low revenue site and high revenue site is nearly 1,000% as measured with Adsenses’ RPM statistic (revenue per thousand impressions, commonly referred to as “Revenue Per Mile”).
From my perspective IE is not a good predictor of whether the visitor is one that “facilitates” Adsense sites. Another observation is that Chrome seems to be the strongest indicator of a poor performing Adsense site because Chrome accounted for around 11% of the visitors on the high revenue site compared to over 30% on the low revenue site. Is it possible that Chrome users are ad-blind like techies, or maybe techies like Chrome?
Safari and Android seem to be most associated with the high revenue blog sites, as 42% of the high revenue site visitors used Safari or Android. The top winner for Adsense friendly browsers seems to be Safari where it accounts for only 3% of the visitors to the low revenue site but accounts for almost 29% of the high-revenue sites.
Safari accounts for almost a third of all visitors for my top performing Adsense site, the one that currently has an $8 RPM, and Safari accounts for only 3% for my super poor performing site with $0.50 RPM.
Top site is > $8 RPM for 30 day period compared to this site (DisplacedGuy.com) at only $0.52 RPM
When it comes to visitor browser the most significant indicator of good/bad RPM is Safari – so the million dollar question is how do you target visitors with the Safari browser… hmm.. shouldn’t be too difficult. I may give that a try.
If you like the article, would you give me a google +1, or a share to help promote the site? Site growth is dependent on community and helping your neighbors. There is plenty of money go around for all of us.
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Jason
December 6, 2012 at 10:28 PM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I’m just starting out and make a pretty low RPM through Adsense. However, I think it is low due to having non-targeted ads in my niche. Competitors are direct selling ads at $30-40 CPM! Do you know of any sites / niches where Adsense is actually holding revenue back?
DisplacedGuy
December 8, 2012 at 6:40 AM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I sure wish that I did know the answer to that question. I usually do research with Googles Adwords planning tools, kind of pretend like I were the one wanting to place ads, and see where it is expensive, then see how much competition there is. Also look for niches that people visit when they are likely to spend money (e.g. septic pumping) and they won’t waste any time. Part of it is a crap shoot, just try and then try again. Good luck. I’ll keep sharing my ideas, please do the same.
Astro Gremlin
December 2, 2012 at 12:36 AM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I came looking to discover what constitutes a decent RPM for AdSense. Appreciate the data. My readers don’t click AdSense ads very much.
Astro Gremlin recently posted..UnAmerican Board Games updated Wed Nov 28 2012 9:38 pm EST
DisplacedGuy
December 8, 2012 at 6:26 AM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
It seems that in general readers don’t click ads, so I’m finding that it takes big numbers to make much money, plus experiment, and adjust, then repeat and you will slowly grow your RPM and ultimately earnings. It used to take forever for me to reach $100 and get paid from Google, but now it seems to hit $100 before I know it. Patience and persistence will pay off. I’ll stop by and visit your site, thanks for stopping by.
DisplacedGuy
January 13, 2013 at 4:27 AM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Thanks for the comment, I’ll take a stroll over to your site and see how it looks.
Bubble Witch Girl
November 30, 2012 at 6:33 PM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I am happy with my, in your opinion low RPM. (okey, promising) I have a very reliable host, a VPS that is hosting only “serious business” except me, so i can hoard all the traffic I need and get a little something by traffic. The sysadmin bitches a bit about my memory usage from time to time, but since nobody else needs all that traffic we can use, the match is made in heaven for now! if you get many visitors, it really doesn’t mater of your RPM is low.
I have learned quite fast that there is absolutely no point top check adsense earning more then 4-5 times every week. The earings updates way too slow. It is much more fun to have the real time analytics running on a big fat screen in the middle og the room……
Bubble Witch Girl recently posted..Level 225 in bubble Witch Saga has two Rounds
logement eco responsable
October 23, 2012 at 5:53 AM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Many thanks because I learnt today from you that my (low traffic yet) site has potential, which I was not sure of!
You made my day
DisplacedGuy
October 27, 2012 at 12:25 AM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Cool. I am glad to hear that I helped. What is your site? What monetization methods are you using? I just started using Amazon and love it. Everyone loves shopping at Amazon and the money can be pretty good. I have a widget on the side of my site where I placed items I personally like and other “techies” tend to like the same thing so when they buy from Amazon they get the same great deal and I get a percentage of purchases even if they purchase outside of the items I posted.
agus
October 16, 2012 at 2:17 PM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
thank you
i have been learning to get $ from google adsense,
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