Not All Adsense Clicks Are Created Equal

Just because Tom gets $2 per click for his baseball site doesn't mean you will get $2 per click for your baseball site.

Google even tells their advertisers the price they pay per click (the price YOU get minus commission) will be discounted based on the ROI (return on investment) google thinks the click will make an advertiser.

We've also made improvements to our smart pricing technology, which discounts the price of clicks on specific sites based on their likelihood to result in strong advertiser ROI. Source

In other words not all adsense clicks are created equal. Plus, it doesn't matter what tom, dick, or harry makes per click or what some online tool (pun intended) tells you.

Sidenote: Interesting they say "specific sites" and not "pages" eh?

What clicks pay the most?

What clicks return the "highest ROI" to advertisers and then google collects the most money on your behalf? That is the million dollar question.

I don't have an answer however I can take some guesses:

The domain "theme" MUST be relevant to the ad the visitor is clicking on or you will get discounted. For instance you can't cram your mortgage adsense pages onto a fishing website to get the big paying clicks (never worked for me anyway)

Traffic Geographic Origin Traffic from Canada, US, and Europe will generally pay the highest.

Adsense Account Holder Quality Classic smart pricing definition. If you are a new account with adsense you get paid less per click. If your account performs poorly on other sites you might get discounted across your entire account. Adsense rewards authority and performance with websites and with adsense accounts.

Traffic Referral Origin Did the visitor that clicked the ad end up at your site from a good site or junk site? Google knows the quality of almost any site on the web (how do you think they get pagerank? rank pages? etc) and therefore if a junk site sends you a visitor their click to your ads will be discounted. In ADDITION they probably have a good idea of what sites send converting or non converting traffic I'm guessing.

Traffic Keyword Origin If you get traffic from search engines what keywords did the searcher use to arrive at your site. Adsense KNOWS these things. If adsense considers the keywords are good for conversions they are going to pay more but if they are stinker keywords you get less. Ever heard this "attract traffic looking to buy stuff?". PLUS google already knows what keywords people WILL spend the most money on so it's probably not that hard for google to figure out what is valuable keyword referral traffic and what isn't.

Time Of Day Your clicks for the same niche will earn more and less based on the times of day you get the click. This isn't based on discounting rather more advertisers spend more money during US daytime hours than US night hours.

Those are my suggestions. Why not put on your tinfoil hat and make a few of your own?

disclaimer: any niches or earnings per click mention in this post were fictional

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed. You can also Subscribe to 45n5 by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.