How To Make Money With Google AdSense – Can You Still Do It in 2022?
It’s 2022 now, and people are still wondering if you can make money with Google AdSense.
Well, yes, you can still do it…but it’s not so easy anymore, and in this article, I will share with you a few things that are important to know if you want to learn how to make money with AdSense.
What is Google AdSense
Now before we begin, I want to explain what AdSense is to the people that don’t know about it, so if you already know about AdSense you should probably skip a few steps.
AdSense is an advertising program that is developed and owned by Google, where basically publishers (people who own websites and blogs) will put up ads that are sponsored by Google on their website and get paid every time someone clicks on those ads.
Now AdSense is a very important part of Google and its revenue because Google is getting pretty much all its money from ads.
Google made $24 billion from ads in 2018. THAT’s a lot of money, just from their ads programs.
So advertisers are using Google Ads which is another program made by Google that basically allows everyone and every company on earth to advertise their business in Google’s search engine and also on YouTube and all their other websites.
But these advertisers can also advertise on millions of other websites that are not owned by Google, via the AdSense program.
To put it in simple terms, AdSense is kind of a middle man between you and an advertiser, without you having to do the hard work in having to go and find multiple advertisers to pay for a spot on your website.
So Google AdSense does that for you automatically, populating your whole website with a multitude of different ads from different advertisers all the time, and these advertisers are always in competition.
How Does AdSense Work
Like I said above, advertisers will get the chance when their advertising in Google to also advertise on other websites, this is where AdSense comes in.
Now, if your website is approved by Google AdSense, you will have the option to put these AdSense ads on your website, inside the articles, at the top (over the fold), in the sidebar, etc…
You only need to copy/paste an ad code from AdSense into your website, and Google does everything else automatically for you, almost like magic.
They will find the best ads and advertisers that are related to your niche and to the keywords you’re using on the site.
So when a lot of advertisers are “fighting” for a spot, they usually will get pushed by Google to pay more for a click, and that means more profits for you.
Google will pay you for every click you send their advertisers from the ads you have on your website. So when you have visitors reading your article and someone clicks on an AdSense ad, you will earn an amount of money for that click, it’s usually something between $0.15 and $1 per click. But the CPC (cost per click) always depends on a factor of things, that I will discuss in more detail below.
Now, keep in mind that Google will always keep a cut of that money, you will receive 68% of the total value of a click (that the advertiser paid for), and Google will keep the rest of 32%.
Example: You have an ad on your website about car insurance, that car insurance company just paid Google $1 for a click (a visitor that clicked on the ad from your website), you will then receive $0.68 and Google will get $0.32.
Sounds good? It is, because the more clicks (traffic) you send via Google AdSense ads, the more you will earn.
DON’T GET THIS WRONG THOUGH:
You can’t simply click on your own ads, or make your family and friends click on the ads on your website for you, Google will BAN and suspend your account in a short time, it’s not 2005 anymore, they have many algorithms and clever ways to figure out if a click is legit or not.
Trust me you will get your account suspended, and guess what, you can’t create another one, at least not on your own name and address so don’t try to gamble the system, they are not stupid.
How to Make Money with Google AdSense in 2022
1. Create a High-Quality Website
First of all, in order to get the chance to make money with Google AdSense, you will first need to have a high-quality website or a blog in order to apply to their program and get approved.
It’s not so easy anymore to get your website approved by Adsense as it was years ago.
The Google team now looks for many details when it comes to new websites joining their program. But mainly your website should be great and not simply created just to make money with adsense.
Yes, there are people out there that are creating made-for adsense websites, which Google is pretty much against, and you pretty much won’t get accepted if you try to sneak in with a website like that.
What does a “Made for Adsense” website mean?
Well, it means all the sites that have skim content, or just a few articles that are not that great with grammatical errors, or sites that are only a bunch of useless and boring articles put together in a highly competitive niche that pays a lot and they don’t have anything else besides adsense ads on their websites.
So yeah, the first step of getting into google adsense and start earning money is to have a high-quality website ready before you apply.
To do that, your website should focus on the following:
- Unique, rich, and engaging content – Such as tutorials, how-to guides, articles, videos
- Authority & Expertise – If health-related the advice should be from qualified authors etc
- Responsive Design – Make sure your website looks good on every device (desktop, mobile, tablet, tv, etc)
- Good User Experience – Your website should be easy to navigate and use by your users, don’t make it complicated
- Website Speed – Your site should load fast, make sure to optimize it properly with plugins and tools
- Social Media Presence – add social media links to your website (Create a Facebook Page, Twitter account, etc for your site)
- Legal Pages – add the necessary legal pages to your site such as Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Contact Page, About Us.
But yeah, by far one of the most important aspects of creating a high-quality website is the content.
You can’t just submit a fresh new website that has only 5 articles that are all 300-500 words to Google AdSense and expect to be approved.
It doesn’t work like that anymore, so yeah make sure you have enough content on your site that is unique, easy to read and to understand, and also a bit longer than 500 words each. Check out 7 tips on how to write good content.
I would suggest you submit your website to be approved by AdSense only after you have about 25-30 unique high-quality articles on your site, with a minimum of 600-800 words each.
Read my tutorial on How to build a blog.
2. WordPress Themes For AdSense
I’m not going to spend a lot of time writing about themes here, but I will quickly suggest a few themes that I think are perfect for AdSense. These themes are lightweight, are SEO optimized, and pretty much all of them are packed with features.
In no particular order, here are some good premium WordPress themes for AdSense:
~ Ad-Sense Theme ~ 
Get Ad-Sense Theme Here
~ SociallyViral ~ 
Get SociallyViral Here
~ AHEAD ~
I mostly use MyThemeShop themes as you can see on all my arbitrage sites, because I like their pricing plans and support is amazing, also the themes are very good and optimized. My favorites are SociallyViral and Schema. I use these 2 themes a lot.
There are of course other premium themes that are just as good, but since I’m not experienced with them I can’t comment if they are good for arbitrage or not, so you can do your own research if you want to have more options.
By the way, I don’t recommend you to search and download premium themes for free from nulled websites, because they are more than likely filled with malware and viruses, leaving your website open to attacks and malicious codes that can then be implemented from a backdoor.
So yeah just don’t do it, always buy themes and plugins because not only you don’t risk the chance of having your website hacked, but you also get awesome support and help from the theme developers as well as future updates.
Also, these are premium / paid themes, I didn’t add any free themes here just because I use paid themes more these days and haven’t touched a free theme in years, so I don’t know which one of them are good or not (especially for arbitrage).
I guess you could browse a good-rated theme in the WordPress repository and be happy with it, but they won’t have enough features and be as good as the premium ones.
3. Do Niche & Keywords Research
Here’s the thing, Adsense can make you more money or less money depending on the niche you’re in and of course the keywords on your site and inside the article.
So basically if you have a financial website like a “how to save money” blog you will make more money via adsense than a website that focuses on “Celebrity news and gossip”.
Not only the niche is important, but you also need to do your research and target the right kind of keywords for every article that you publish.
Use a tool like Semrush or Ubbersuggest to see what your competition and other websites are doing and also to find out hot related keywords that can earn you more money with adsense.
So let’s look at this example:
If you’re having a blog about saving money, the keywords for each article you’re writing are also very important. Here’s why:
For the keyword: “How To Save Money”, the CPC is $2.61, but if you wrote an article about “How to save money on car insurance” the CPC for that is $30.34.
Now let’s keep things real, you won’t really get $30.34 per click each time someone clicks on your AdSense ads just because you have that keyword inside your article.
It doesn’t work like that, in fact, that’s the average CPC that advertisers are paying to appear in Google’s top search engine results, not on publisher websites like yours.
But, that does mean that even if you’re not getting $30 a click using long-tail keywords like that can and will increase your average CPC that you’re getting from your AdSense ads.
So the higher the CPC is for search engine ads, the more valuable and expensive the clicks will also be on AdSense ads on publisher websites, makes sense?
Instead of $0.2-$0.3 clicks you might instead get $0.7-$2 per click, depending on keywords and of course the location of your users.
So yeah, make sure to always do your keywords research before you write and publish an article on your site if you want higher AdSense earnings.
Check out my blog post on How To Find Your Niche if you need a clear guide on how to do it.
4. Follow the rules
Keep in mind that to join the Adsense program your website needs to comply with their policies and guidelines check out more details here.
Never use copyrighted content on your website (such as images, text, or videos). Always create your content from scratch or pay someone else to do it for you.
Use royalty-free images, if you don’t want to pay for them, there are a few sites that can provide you with amazing photos that are free to use on your website and Google won’t have a problem with those. Check out Pixabay and Pexels for royalty-free images.
Google Adsense is pretty strict about their rules, and if you violate some of their rules and guidelines you will receive a warning and if it’s a severe violation you will even get your whole AdSense account suspended.
And guess what…
You can’t create another AdSense account if you get suspended/banned the first time.
Because Google only allows you to have 1 account, and if that one gets banned, well… you can’t open another one. You will need a new name, new address, new payment system, a new website, etc… and even if you manage to open a new account they will catch you sooner or later and ban you again.
So make sure to always follow their rules and stay clear of any AdSense violations.
Also, you can check out my other article that shows you the top 22 Best Google AdSense Alternatives if you do get banned or if your site doesn’t get approved.
5. Get Traffic to Your AdSense Website
Perhaps this is the hardest step of them all, after creating a high-quality website, you will need traffic in order to make any money from AdSense.
Without traffic (website visitors) to your website, no one will click on ads, and if no one clicks on ads you don’t make money, simple as that.
There are many ways to get traffic to a website, you can get it for free and you can even pay for it (yes, it’s not illegal to pay for traffic if you have adsense on a site, more on that later down below).
The majority of people who are creating AdSense websites are focusing on free traffic methods such as SEO (Search engine optimization) and Social Media.
I would say maybe 95% of the AdSense site owners are getting free traffic, the other 5% might choose to pay for it… (These are not exact figures, but that’s just my approximation).
Most people prefer doing SEO, and ranking articles in Google and other search engines, and then receive free traffic to their websites and earn from AdSense that way.
Others are focusing on social media traffic such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, which is also free… and a few of us are even paying for traffic (me included).
All traffic methods are good and they all work. It just depends on how you prefer to do things.
If you’re a newbie though and you don’t have funds to invest and you also don’t want to risk your AdSense account, you should focus on SEO, social media, and other free traffic methods. Learn how to get traffic to your blog.
Paying for traffic for a website that has AdSense ads on it, while it’s not against Google’s rules, it’s a bit more tricky and difficult because you risk losing money when buying the traffic and also potentially lose your AdSense account if you’re buying junk traffic. You can read more about this later in the article.
How to Use Google Adsense Correctly
Even though Adsense removed the number of ads that are limited to be displayed on a page, you still shouldn’t have more than 3-5 ads on any single page.
Of course, this depends on how long your content is so for example if you have an article with 5000-10000 words, then yeah, you can have more ads than 5 and Google wouldn’t mind, otherwise, you should keep your number of ads relative to the amount of content you have on that page.
But in general, though, I would keep it on the low side, like 3 to 5 ads per page (depending on the article length).
So here’s what I recommend, one ad above the fold under the title, one ad in the sidebar, another ad at the middle of the content/article, another ad at the bottom of the article, and you can also have one more ad in the footer of the site if there are other things between the bottom of the article and the footer like a “related stories/articles” section or comments, etc…
This is pretty much my setup on all the adsense sites that I own. Funny enough I found out that having fewer ads on a page gives me more revenue, because the user experience is nicer, and the people tend to stay on the page longer and get engaged, and then the adsense click is worth more.
Also, it’s a good idea to never use more than 1 or 2 ad networks on a site, especially if one of them is Adsense.
So if you plan on having pop up ads, or even having malware ads from using some shady ads company, I suggest you only stick with Adsense, it’s better in the long term for your relationship with Google, plus there is a chance you will earn more with just Adsense anyway.
If you do want to use more than Adsense on your website, you could try and sign up for a native ads company such as Taboola or Outbrain, and you can maybe earn a little bit more revenue alongside Adsense.
But you need a high-traffic website to join those networks.
There are other native advertising companies such as Revcontent, Content.ad, Adnow, etc, they can also work, but they pay less than the first two, and also they tend to have a bit more “naughty” ads, that are on the scammy side, making your site look unprofessional.
Google AdSense Earnings
I know that you’re curious about how much can you make with google adsense but in reality it all depends on a few things:
- The niche of your website
- The kind of content you have
- The GEO location of your users
- The time spent on site
- The keywords inside the article
- The number of ads you have on a page
- What type of ads you’re using
- The time of year (generally people earn more in the holiday season than at the start of the year)
So as you can see, when it comes to google adsense earnings, no one can tell you for sure how much money you can make with your website because in reality there are a lot of things that can affect that.
What I can tell you is that there are countries that can bring you a much higher cost per click earnings such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom, than the rest of the world.
So the location of your website’s users matters a lot in terms of how much money you can make from AdSense.
That’s because there are many advertisers that are competing inside Google Ads, to sell things in the countries I’ve mentioned above, and when things get crowded in the online advertising space, pretty much everything gets more expensive.
The cost per click that the advertiser will pay will be higher, and thus the revenue that you will get from AdSense if you have traffic from those countries will be much higher than if you had traffic from countries like Peru, Argentina, India, Pakistan, Brazil, etc…
I will publish an Adsense list of high CPC countries in the future, so subscribe to my newsletter if you want to be notified when it goes live.
So yeah, adsense earnings can vary a lot, and I can’t tell you for sure how much money you will make, it’s up to you to decide on the niche your website will be in, where you will get your traffic from, etc…
How to Get Paid from AdSense
You get paid every month usually around the 21st for the earnings you’ve made the previous month.
So let’s say you’ve made $500 in earnings for the month of January, you will get paid by Google at the end of the next month in February, usually around the 21st-26th.
Also keep in mind that in order to get paid the next month you will have to reach over the minimum payment threshold which is different for every country but it’s basically $100 or 70 Euros, so if you don’t make $100 this month, you won’t get paid the next month, instead you will get paid the month after your account earned over $100 or so.
You can get payments from Google Adsense via various methods such as Direct deposit to your bank account, Check, Western Union, wire transfer, and Rapida.
Can you live entirely off Google Adsense?
Yes and no. I mean you pretty much can do it, depending on the country/city you’re from and what costs you have. In general, people that have a fairly decent website with good traffic can make a living solely with adsense.
However…
You should never depend on one single source of income, especially not Adsense with how strict they are. I suggest you also take a look at affiliate marketing and try to have more ways than you can earn money online other than adsense.
Adsense Secrets
There are a few adsense secrets and tips that I use most of the time on my adsense websites, and I will share some of those with you.
1. Adsense Arbitrage
I’ve talked about adsense arbitrage earlier in the article when I’ve explained to you how to get traffic to your adsense website, where some people prefer to pay for their traffic.
But please keep in mind this is very different than having a “made for adsense” website, which Google absolutely hates and won’t even approve your application.
So here are some more details:
What is adsense arbitrage?
Well to put it simply, you need to have a high-quality adsense website like I’ve explained earlier, and when you have that, and you get approved into Adsense, instead of waiting for SEO to receive traffic to your website and start earning from adsense, you can instead buy the traffic from other places, at a cheaper rate than what Adsense is paying you.
So basically:
You buy low and sell high, in this case, you buy cheap website traffic and earn more from the adsense ads that you have on the site to cover the costs and also to make a profit.
Sounds illegal and scammy? Well, it’s not.
I’ve heard a lot of people and “gurus” saying that buying traffic for a website that has AdSense on it will get your account suspended… well guess what? That’s simply not true.
Google never specifies that you shouldn’t use paid advertising to promote your website, in fact, they even mention that if you do, you just need to be careful about the quality of traffic that you buy.
Don’t buy bot traffic that give you invalid clicks on your ads, etc… and that basically, you are responsible for the traffic your website is getting.
You can read Google’s own words on this issue here.
So if you buy your traffic from legit sources (with no bots and no invalid clicks), and you have a high-quality website, that users are engaging with and are happy to read and to browse, Google should not give you any problems.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and Google can pretty much ban and suspend any website or adsense account as they see fit and change their policies when they want, especially if you break the rules.
So yeah you should be careful with this, especially if you don’t know if a company that is selling traffic is legit.
I’ve done Adsense arbitrage for the past 5 or so years, and I haven’t had a problem so far with Google, but that’s because I have quality websites that are providing users with more than just ads.
My sites have great content, and I also promote other things as well such as affiliate products and my own services, newsletters, shops with merch, etc… so it doesn’t look like I’m doing it all just to earn from AdSense.
I also found out that when I have a website that is new without any rankings in Google, and I pay for my traffic, the SEO positions are also increasing, simply because Google is seeing that I have users reading my content, engaging with it, sharing it on social media, etc…
This, in turn, boosts my SEO efforts, which means that later I will be able to get free traffic from the search engines, and don’t have to rely so heavily on paid traffic.
Of course, it’s not so easy to just pay for traffic and get a website ranked, you DO need to have on-site and off-site SEO optimization is done to your website, but having traffic that is sharing and reading your content does help a little bit.
There are people that are doing hundreds and even thousands a day using this method, so yeah it can be done but you need to always follow the rules and be careful where you buy your traffic from.
And if you’re a newbie to internet marketing, websites, adsense, etc… just stick to free traffic methods such as SEO and social media, and later when you get a little more experience and money you might try and invest in paid traffic.
Check out my latest article if you’re interested in AdSense Arbitrage.
2. Don’t Use Auto Ads
This is when you let Google place ads on your website and they decide the size of the ads and the placements.
It sounds nice since it’s easy to implement your Adsense ads on your website this way, but in reality, from my experience and a few other marketers who wrote about this, using Auto Ads will decrease your revenue.
Basically, the Auto Ads A.I. (Artificial Intelligence system), will try and place adsense ads in weird positions on your site and just make the whole user experience bad.
Stick with the normal popular ad sizes and with above-the-fold ad placements, and you will earn more revenue with adsense this way.
3. Responsive Ads Might Lower Earnings
The same as with the above, with responsive ads, you let Google decide the size of the ad, and some ad sizes can pay less than others.
If you use a WordPress plugin like Ad Inserter, you can use regular-sized ads on the desktop version of the site, for example, a 728×90 banner, and then turn this ad off and replace it with another ad dimensions such as 300×250 when the same ad slot is viewed on mobile.
This way you maximize and increase the chances to earn higher revenue from Adsense by simply using the more popular ad sizes that are used by advertisers all the time.
Even if Adsense will give you more money for clicks on responsive ads, sometimes the ad sizes are very different in size than the more popular ones that the general public are used to, and that can make some people not click on the ad, and to avoid it, thus making you lose money.
However, always test this out, before you decide against responsive ads, as you know already, there are many things that can change the CPC (cost per click) you will get, so sometimes a site can earn more using responsive ads.
4. Test, Test, Test…
Like I just said above, you should test things out. Test responsive ads VS. fixed ads, test ad colors, test ad formats, test different ad placements on your website.
Test everything.
You never know how changing something even a little bit, can bring you extra revenue every month.
I once changed from blue links in my ads to red links, and I’ve seen an increase of 40% in ad revenue.
However I tried doing the same experiment on another site and I simply lost money, so I had to go back to blue links again for the other site. Basically, this means that what works for someone or for some website might not always work for you or your website, so that’s why you should always test things out for yourself and not blindly following people and guides.
Keep your tests for at least 2 weeks before you decide if something is performing better or worse than before.
If you do see that you’re losing a lot of ad revenue in the first few days though, you can just stop it and revert back, but if you’re not losing money that much you should probably just stick it up for 2 weeks.
5. Don’t limit the ad types
When you create an ad inside AdSense you will be asked what type of ad should it be, Text ad, Display ad (image banner), or both.
Always leave it on both: Text/Display ads, as it is on default.
This way you get to have advertisers compete for your ad space and the higher the bid, the more you will earn. Simply choosing text ads only, won’t necessarily mean that you will increase AdSense earnings, in fact, they decrease quite a lot from my tests.
Conclusion
So, can you still make money with adsense? I would say YES, AdSense is definitely a good way to earn money online even in 2022.
I still have a few sites that are monetized with AdSense (combined with a few affiliate products/services in addition to AdSense), they bring me regular revenue every month.
Would I recommend you try monetizing a website with AdSense? YES.
However…
You shouldn’t just rely on and focus on Google Adsense. You should try and make money online via multiple sources, not just with AdSense.
Why?
Well, as I said above, adsense is a great way to make money online, BUT you depend a lot on Google.
If they decide one day that your website is in violation of one of their policies and rules, they will suspend your AdSense account and your site will not earn that much money anymore, in fact, you might even lose all the money you earned for that month when your AdSense account got suspended.
Yes, there are many adsense alternatives out there that you can join, but none of them compare to Google Adsense in terms of how much you can earn and how reliable they are for receiving payments on time every month.
So overall AdSense is great but you should also have other ways to earn money online such as affiliate marketing or promoting your own products or services.
I hope this article about how to make money with google adsense has helped you out, and if you have any questions, leave me a comment below, also don’t forget to share it 🙂
that was a great and useful article.
especially the Get Traffic to Your AdSense Website section.
I’m working on making traffic for my website for days and this blog really helped.
thanks
Thanks, glad to hear it helped 🙂
Very insightful article. Thanks for sharing
Cheers,
Stephen
Hey,
Can you give me more ads placement to test them on my site?
Use the ad inserter plugin and test out as many placements as you’d like. I couldn’t tell you what more placements to use because every site and niche will perform differently. So it’s all about testing and optimizing. You can also try Google’s auto ads and run experiments with that as well.
Good luck,
Stephen
How to find low CPC or High CPC ads?
Well, there are many factors that determine a low or high CPC. For example your niche, the articles and keywords that you have on pages with ads, the country of your users, how much time they spend on site, etc. There is really no clear answer simply because there are so many things that can influence this.
Some niches like: insurance, health, and business for users from countries such as US, Canada, and Australia will have a higher than average CPC.
Hope this helps, good luck,
Stephen
Wow!!! This is really a lesson. Both the tutorial and the Questions. Thanks a lot.
Please I just started blogging 3 weeks ago.
My own question is
1. I want to use paid traffic and i know i have good content. I saw a site;
….com; do you know if they are OK for traffic?2. If I use paid traffic, should i land the traffic straight to the ad-sense page or do i land them on a landing page and allow visitors to click on their own to navigate to other pages?
3. Can I use my homepage as my landing page?
4. Do you have an idea about the CPM for Nigeria traffic?
5. Can I add ad-sense in every page of my blog?
6. What are the things needed to be in place before they approve a request?
Hi there,
1. No advertising on my site, please. Also, I only recommend traffic sites that I personally test, see my website traffic sources that I work or worked with.
2. Straight to the Adsense page, it’s up to you if you use a paginated post or not. See my AdSense arbitrage guide for more details.
3. Yes, but I don’t recommend that, because you will not make a profit most of the time.
4. Nope, it also depends on traffic type and website Niche.
5. Yes, but make sure to have more content than ads on the page to keep Google happy. For example, don’t put ads on Contact pages where you only have a contact form and no other content, you will get policy strikes if you do that and risk your account to get suspended.
6. Who are you talking about? Google Adsense? A website with enough unique content that’s nicely-created without using copyrighted text or images.
Hope this helps a bit,
Stephen
Nice Article!
I have just started with Adsense and I am getting around 2-3 clicks per day but the overall revenue per day has not exceeded $1.
Is it normal or am I doing something wrong?
Regards,
Hi,
Yes it’s normal. You might not even earn $1 from 2-3 clicks even if the traffic is from US. But yeah, it’s normal. It depends on the GEO (country) of the traffic, and the niche, duration on site, etc…
Keep going and you will see improvements in a few months. Focus on quality content more though.
Cheers,
Stephen
Thank you for the article, but i still don’t understand how much adsense pay in average
That depends, there is no way to know how much you could make on AdSense. It depends on many things, the country of the traffic, the article and keywords, the niche, the time spent on site by users, the device, how many ads you have in relation to content, etc… many many things that can impact your AdSense earnings.
So in reality I can’t really give you a straight answer, because nobody can, not even Google, since it depends on too many factors. On average though, you can expect a CPM between $0.3 and $2. It can go lower or higher though.
Good luck
Hello Stephen, thank you for this article, great insight. I enjoyed it.
Ok, basically I started using Google AdSense a few months ago and just as I got to about $25 in earning, I was told to verify my identity by using my national ID card, thought surprisingly because I knew I was yet to reach $100 threshold. I proceeded as instructed but to cut the long story short, I didn’t know I had limit to the number of times I could verify my identity because I was told my documents were not supported (apparently what we use as national ID card in my country is not a standard one just yet). I tried it three times and was told I had reach the number of trials, so a failed identification. During this process, ads stopped showing on my website because they had this message that ads will not show if I didn’t verify my identity. I tried contacting Google but they didn’t have a support system to help solve this issue.
This happened in January 2020 and ads has stop showing since then, any other means to help solve the problem was not stated by Google and my site has become redundant since then.
I have two questions Stephen;
1. Do you by anyway know how I can solve this problem, most probably if you’ve encountered such.
2. If the problem cannot be solved, should I proceed to use other means of monetising my site and what other means can you advise me to go into..
Thanks Stephen.
My name is Peter from Nigeria.
Hi Peter,
I’m sorry to hear that happening to your AdSense account, I’m sure it sucks. Unfortunately, I really haven’t encountered this issue in the years that I have been using AdSense to monetize my sites.
I’ve signed up with AdSense so many years ago that I don’t even remember what the process was. In any case your best bet is to try and contact them or post on their google adsense forums link: https://support.google.com/adsense/community?hl=en
Also see if there’s a way to contact them through this page: https://support.google.com/adsense#contact=1&topic=3373519
The tricky part is that they won’t give you email or chat support unless you earn a certain amount of money, so you might not be able to email them directly, in which case, posting on their forums is your next best thing.
For your 2nd question, to be honest if you have other ways to monetize your site (if the site gets a lot of traffic and your losing revenue) yeah I would change from AdSense to pretty much anything else, like Clickbank banners, CPA offers, etc.. but nothing scammy or illegal as Google might still look at your site when you contact them etc.
Hope this helps a bit, wish you all the best to solve this issue.
Stephen
Thanks Stephen, I appreciate the quick response.
Firstly, I have surf the whole internet trying to solve the problem, I have also checked out the links you put up there several times, both the google help and community, but there was no such thing as solution to the problem. I was hoping to get their mail in order to contact them, but as you said above, it’s nearly impossible.
Everyone on the Community that had similar issues are all as confused as I am with pretty much no solution. There is no contact support at all and that’s the painful part.
I am still hoping they release it soon enough.
Secondly for the clickbanks, CPA and all, what’s the best you could advise me to go for, I just need a little bit advise from an expert. Like the best organisation that offer the best online…
Thanks once again and so sorry to disturb you
Hi Peter,
Yeah that’s sad to hear, I know how tough it is to get in touch with them even I struggle many times and in the end resolve my issues by Googling for 3 days lol.
Anyway outside of talking with them since this is really an account problem that needs to be addressed asap by them, I don’t really know what options you could have out there.
So yeah, until then I would look for something else, you could take a look at my affiliate marketing guide and see some of the networks that I recommend, but in the end it doesn’t really matter which one you chose, it’s more about the products that are related to your niche and website.
So register on Clickbank and Commission Junction and also sign up for some CPA networks and take a look at what products and services might be a good match for your site and try and place some of those on your site.
If you want something like AdSense I think Media.net is an alternative but kinda hard to get approved and also the numerous native ad networks like RevContent, Taboola, Content.ad, MGID, etc.
Good luck man, and don’t worry you didn’t disturb me at all… sometimes it takes a while for me to reply like a few days or so but yeah I’m glad to help.
Stephen
Thanks Stephen,
You’ve been of great help. Wish you luck in your endeavours.????
You’re welcome, and thanks, good luck to you too.
Hi Stephen,
Your Adsense tutorial appeared when I search for updated information about Google Adsense. And I really appreciate your effort in sharing this load of information that you have written.
Thank you so much!
One question though is, based on your actual experience – what particular Adsense tool that you are using is very helpful in :
1. Adding/inserting Adsense ads inside or outside of the WordPress website articles.
2. Monitoring Adsense Performance, particularly a possible source of “invalid clicks” that may result to “click fraud”.
Can you recommend the best tool that we can possibly use?
Thanks again Stephen.
Cheers!
Sammy
Hi Sammy,
Glad you enjoyed the tutorial, now for your questions:
1. I use Ad Inserter or the PRO version of it for more functions, but also I sometimes manually add the code directly into the template files.
2. I monitor solely by using Google Analytics that is linked with Google AdSense. Using UTM tags with macros from the ad networks on all my arbitrage article links will show me exactly what source is sending me invalid traffic, bots, and traffic that is not performing well on site. Yes, there are some services out there that will help you against click fraud etc, but I never use them anymore, since Google does a pretty good job in filtering out the invalid clicks.
As for the best tools to use, check out my internet marketing resources page, those are all the tools I use daily in all my online business including adsense and arbitrage.
Hope this helps.
All the best,
Stephen
Hi Stephen
i have 1200k view with 2 cclick ads
i placed well the ads but no results
Can you help me solve this problem
Where is the traffic coming from? Is it SEO or Do you buy it from a network? In general, if the ads are placed well, it’s only a matter of traffic source being the problem.
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for the wonderful guidance. But 1 question wondering me is how google pays you? And with the currency different cuz i am living in asia
You can get paid directly into your bank account or even with Western Union, the currency will be the one you set up in your account when you first create it, or it might also be country based I can’t remember well since I’ve opened my account so many years ago.
Good luck,
Stephen
Google Adsense pays pennies, these days. The best method to monetize a blog is to accept sponsored content and review products. Even the articles that I write about health does not convert well, sometimes clicks are not recognized by Adsense, I just keep it on my blog as a side income, not to make a living out of it.
It depends on your traffic, GEO, niche, placements, time spent on site by users, and many many more… It can pay pennies if your traffic is from India and Brazil for example, but it can even pay $1+ per click for US traffic, usually I have around $0.6-$1 for US clicks.
Of course, it’s always good to diversify your income and try to have a few more options other than AdSense, but trust me, if done correctly you can still make money in 2019 using just AdSense alone.
Regards,
Stephen
This is the best ever article I have ever read online, because I wasn’t able to skip any word or paragraphs as I always do.
Sir, I will like to be your little son. I will you to be part of me. I want to be speaking or discussing with you like dad and son.
Am from Nigeria, I have failed number of times due to lack of good guidance but I still learn from people online to correct my mistakes.
Please accept my offer
Hi Benedict,
I’m very happy that you enjoyed my article and I really hope that it will help you out in your journey, however at this time I don’t do any private mentoring or coaching.
The reason is pretty simple, I’m busy almost all the time with all of my projects and I feel that publishing good quality guides on this blog will be able to help more people than I would to help if I simply did one on one coaching.
So glad you liked my articles and I hope you stick around to read other stuff that I have planned for the future but for now I’m afraid I can’t do any 1-on-1 coaching.
Good luck and all the best,
Stephen
Hi Stephen, thanks for so great article!
I have just one question. I tried to use Google Analytics with UTM tags to track bad publisher ids. The main problem is that GA has big latency in showing stats. Usually I have to wait up to 12 hours to get publisher’s clicks registered and during that 12 hours I get tons of bot clicks. So the entire process of filtering bot clicks is quite slow and inefficient. How do you solve that? Do you use some alternative tool? And if yes how do you use it? Thanks a lot.
Hi Michael,
Well sometimes when you want instant live data then you will have to use a paid tracker, such as RedTrack or FunnelFlux.
I haven’t talked too much about these paid trackers because usually, people want free stuff and the UTM tags work just as fine with the exception of data delay like you mentioned, also you lose the AdSense clicks data that Google only shares with Google Analytics, which is super important.
Also, sometimes, depending on how you’ve set up your UTM tags, and when you know what you’re looking for, you can even use the Real-Time tab inside analytics and see all the traffic live, most of the times you can pretty much tell when some users are bots, via the medium or traffic source channel, and if you see that you have 100 visits, for example, all from the same ID/medium/etc, hovering on just the 1st page of your article, you can immediately block it.
Hope this helps,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for the answer.
Actually it would be awesome if you at least briefly discuss paid solutions for visitors tracking. How do they support bot detection? Do they show sessions num/session duration/page views? Do they support UTC params? Creating accounts and testing those services can take a lot of time and $ so it would be really nice to know your experience.
Hi Michael,
There is a reason why I don’t recommend or use any paid tracking systems while doing adsense arbitrage.
That reason is simple: You can’t see the AdSense clicks from different UTM parameters in any tracking software, that’s simply because the AdSense data can only be automatically shared with Analytics.
So yes, there is a delay in data like you said previously in Analytics, but it makes up for it usually by showing you exactly which users clicked on adsense ads and which one didn’t (and you can then block them).
Since Google only shares AdSense data with your Google Analytics account (make sure to link them from the account settings), seeing this important data (adsense clicks) in any other tracking software other than Analytics is basically impossible.
The only way a tracker excels a bit over analytics is the instant data…but that data is not really that helpful if you can’t see who clicked on AdSense ads. You can, however, figure out if someone sends you bot traffic if the bounce rate is 100%, time spent on site is 0 seconds, etc… but it’s not really worth it to lose the AdSense clicks data in my opinion.
So I would recommend you to go ahead and use just Analytics with Adsense linked and UTM tags, and don’t worry about losing too much money (like I said you should be expecting to lose money with AdSense arbitrage, at least in the beginning), because every day after you filter out the bot traffic it will become better and better (hopefully).
Hope this helps and clears out the confusion between paid trackers and analytics.
Stephen
Your answer is super helpful. I will continue to use just Analytics to filter out bots at the end of every day. Thank you so much an good luck with this fantastic blog!
Thanks, glad that I was able to help you. Good luck also 🙂
He actually explained almost everything on how to make money with google adsense.
Thanks to the writer for this guide
Appreciate the support 🙂
Thanks
I love this one 😀
great and structured information,..
this site deserve more surfers 😀
Thank you Fadjirin, glad you enjoyed it 🙂
Thanks Stephen it is a very nice article. I understand a lots of things about google adsense.
I am designing a educational tutorials site for various examinations and all the materials are free in my site.
I invest a lot of money on it for this materials design.
I design the site in such a way I hope traffic will be high.
But I have no such idea about google adsense.
Is it possible that I income standard income from google ad sense from educational site in India.
Hi Debashis,
Well from my testings I didn’t have a lot of luck doing arbitrage in India, but mainly because the traffic was not really that cheap, and the users didn’t click as much on ads as other countries, also not to mention the very low CPC that AdSense is paying for clicks from India.
So while adsense arbitrage targeting India is not profitable (at least for me it wasn’t, also depends on the ad network), you could make money with your sites in India, if the traffic you’re getting will be free, from social media or search engines.
Best of luck,
Stephen
Thanks for the article
I removed adsense and cancelled the account.
All the ads look like bait links with a big ass ‘click here button’.
The ads make the page look cheap and ugly.
Hi Faisal,
Yeah that can happen, but remember that you have a section under your AdSense account to block ads that you don’t like, and they won’t appear anymore.
You can also choose only ads from certain categories that are more serious and less spammy.
But yeah I understand your concerns, however AdSense has probably the most mild ads on the web, and I doubt you will find better ad companies that will deliver cleaner ads, good luck though.
All the best,
Stephen
Thanks a lot for this wonderful article. I never knew that auto ads might reduce earnings. I was just considering using it on my site but this article has actually exposed me to what I needed to know about it. I really appreciate.
Stephen
I must say I am amazed by what you just put up here and hey I am a big fan
I am about to get an account on megapush and I will do that buy your link as I did not see anything else worth doing to say my thanks here.
I appreciate your works and I will update this comment section with my success story on Adsense once I do.
Thanks again and I appreciate your article.
Thanks for the nice words Nnoli,
You don’t really have to buy through my links, but I appreciate it, you can also try PropellerAds if you feel that MegaPush is not for you.
Wish you best of luck in your journey.
Cheers,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
I read both articles, this one and the one for arbitrage. “TOP”
I have a small experience with Native Ads (Specially Taboola) for arbitrage website.
My Questions:
1- Even if I see that an article is working well for someone on Anstrex, when I tested it on Taboola, (Impressions, CTR, clicks ) Are Too Low.
What CPC do you advise to start with?
My case is (base on traffic that I got using Facebook Ads):
Adsense CPC is between 0.15 and 0.4
Adsense CTR 10%
2- From your experience with Taboola, do you recommend to start with a high CPC even if we will lose money on Adsense on this case?
Thanks,
Abdou
Hi Abdou,
1. About Taboola CTR: You need to keep in mind that these ads appear on a bunch of websites around the world, which means that some of them will give you better CTRs than others. So basically Sites: A, B, C, might perform better CTR wise than sites: X, Y, Z. Only way to figure it out is to test and blacklist/whitelist some of the ones that are working or not working.
Another reason why you might have low CTR and impressions is the fact that you made maybe the same ads and the same type of article as the other ones… Of course this can work well sometimes to just copy everything someone else did, but the fact is that it can also hurt your CTR since people are already familiar with that type of ad/article, and so they won’t be interested to click on it anymore.
The CPC you’re paying and the GEO you’re advertising in, can also be a major factor of low CTR/impressions.
2. You can’t base everything on the Facebook Ads CTR, because these are different types of traffic and they will behave differently, there are many things that can increase or decrease the CPC as I’ve explained in both articles, so this one is guesswork or just trial and error.
I haven’t used Taboola in a few years now, so I don’t really know what things have changed or not, but usually, I keep it simple. I create two campaigns, one with low CPC and the other with slightly higher CPC, with different ad sets, and see which one performs better and brings me a better ROI. You can try this one out if you like, and of course, if you can afford to lose some money to test.
Do you have a paginated article page to which you’re sending the Taboola traffic? If not, you might lose money anyway, so make sure you have that one implemented.
I hope this helps,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for your answer,
Yes for sure i have pagination on my website (thank’s for the notif).
I still learn a lot just for turning ON comment notification on your blog.
Big Thanks,
Hi Abdou,
I’m glad to hear that… keep on pushing 🙂
Good luck,
Stephen
Nice article stephen… after finishing the article.. i had spend more time to check your discussion with Mr. Jimmy.
Glad you liked it 🙂
Hi Stephen again after a long week,
I tried again Adsense arbitrage with megapush but it is just not working. I just placed only 1 ad at the end of the article and I got 15 clicks after 1000 visitors and made around $0.60 targeting India and after an hour it is only 5 clicks and $0.20. I am not gonna follow megapush traffic from now on. It is so frustrating I can’t tell you. Anyway, looking forward to your thoughts on this.
Jimmy
Hi Jimmy,
That sucks to hear, but I told you like 3 times not to focus on India, as it doesn’t convert for me either. No idea why you didn’t try any other countries or ideas that I’ve mentioned before. Do you still have money left in MegaPush if so, you can try other countries. Also was it mobile or desktop traffic? Send me a screenshot with your website to see the ad positions, and see how they are stacked. But yea 90% of the fault lies on India, sorry to say that.
I think I will be finishing the arbitrage article today, or maybe early tomorrow, and you will see more details in there that could maybe help you. You could also try Propeller or other native ad companies like Taboola, Revcontent, AdNow, Content.ad. (be careful with Revcontent though, they do have still a lot of bot traffic, you need to make sure to catch it before it can ruin your budget).
I just did a quick test this week on megapush but not for arbitrage just for CPA sales, and for me it converted well. But I never touch India, Brazil, Russia, China, US, Mexico. I just had too much bad results from these countries that it’s not worth it for me anymore.
Regards,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
I heard that google adsense ad serving has been disabled on auto blogging blog post where content gets published from feeds. I mean to say it violates the google adsense policy now. Is it really true. Is it same with the curated content site. Does adsense ad allows on curated content site. Is it adsense safe. I just did not got the actual answer to be honest so I thought I should ask this silly question which is really a stupid thing. Both auto blogging blog post and curated content seems similar to me. Let me know it anyway.
Well, like I’ve said earlier in the post, you do want to have a high-quality website, that means no auto blogs what so ever… Are people still doing them? If so why? They are useless.
Anyway, I don’t really know about curated content, but I guess it should be fine as long as the content is unique and not copy/pasted from different sites without being edited first into a nice solid article.
However, I could be wrong, as I never did that… In general, Google wants awesome and unique content, if you have that, they shouldn’t care. Obviously, that excludes auto blogging.
You could also create a post / question on the google adsense forums and see if someone who knows more than I do about this issue can clarify this for you.
Cheers,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
I just send push notification traffic directly to site url. I have google analytics connected to google adsense but I did not use UTM tags. I just could not get it actually how to use it with my article. As far as traffic is concerned. Time on page is around 2 minute but average session duration is only 10 seconds which is terrible. You are right. Even though if clicks were legit I could not have made profit with India. I had a loss of $2. With Israel, Spend $0.60 on megapush and I had 2 clicks on Adsense and made $0.34. Next day I saw it and it was only $0.17. Bad luck. How you get rid of this problem. Do you still get your Adsense balance reversed. Anyway, I was curious to know is it invalid activity on Adsense account. I mean is it risky despite the fact that it was real human traffic. I thought for a second that I should stop using megapush traffic to avoid any sorts of problem with Adsense. Let me know it.
Hi Jimmy,
I corrected the name thing so don’t worry about it, it was pretty funny.
Anyway, you need to use UTM tracking tags for analytics like so:
https://yoursite.com/your-arbitrage-article/?utm_source={camp_id}&utm_medium={feedid}
Those are the megapush tokens, and you could see after that in Analytics which feed/campaign is performing better.
Also about the invalid clicks, yeah I had them too and I still do have them, like I said to you earlier, if I have for example $1000 per month check from AdSense, they will hold like $25-$30 for invalid clicks… so yeah it still happens to me, but I’m buying hundreds of thousands of visits, so it adds up pretty quickly.
I can never get rid of them completely, so far I haven’t had a problem with AdSense because of this, now I can’t guarantee that it will be the same for you, so who knows… I would just keep continuing and see if you can improve the site/traffic and not get so much invalid clicks.
I told you earlier a few ways to minimize invalid clicks, ad position is important, tag your ads as “advertisement”, leave 20px padding at top and bottom of ad, if you have mobile traffic make sure the first time the user enters your site the only ad you can have is a 300×250 for mobile, otherwise it will be a full adsense ad and that can give you invalid clicks as well.
Also, try a campaign just for desktop, and see if it’s better or not, but use the analytics/megapush tracking tags as I’ve explained above.
Even though you had some bad luck I still wouldn’t be discouraged if I were you. You did not lose that much anyway like $5? You learned a couple of things, plus the most important being that the traffic converts and that with a few adjustments you can make it profitable. You just need to test things more, like ad positions, different countries, desktop vs mobile etc. Btw, desktop traffic should be cheaper on megapush than mobile if I remember correctly, so yeah try that too… test some new countries like Jamaica, Fiji, etc…
Good luck.
Hi Stephen,
I have got something very important to discuss.
I send push notification traffic to my adsense site using megapush. It was India traffic and I got 1400 visitors spending $4.5 and I checked my adsense account and I made $3.1. After an hour I checked it again and now it is $1.19. I am confused right now. What went wrong.
What would be your advice.
Hi Jimmy,
Hmm… I think some of the clicks were deemed invalid in the eyes of Google. I had this happen to me a few times in the past.
That can happen for various reasons such as: multiple clicks on an ad from the same IP, clicks on an ad that was almost instant when the user entered the site (without spending time on site too much), or maybe the users clicked on the ad by mistake and then when entered the advertiser site immediately hit the backspace/go back button to your site, signaling to google that the click was a mistake, this can happen because of your ad position etc.
I use this text – Advertisement – before my ads, to make sure that they know it’s an ad, and also leave a bit of space between my ads and text / images about 20px top and bottom.
Also if you have paginated content like next page buttons and adsense very close to it they can mistake the adsense ad as the next page button so be careful with that.
It’s good that you started though, and seen some results, even though they were not very good, it’s still something that you can learn and improve from, plus now you know that it’s not bot traffic and the users are real, a concern you had in the past… too bad about the invalid clicks though… I’ve seen with my own eyes $25 gone in 1 minute from US clicks, so yeah I understand the feeling.
Have you used {feed_id} into your UTM tags for the link? Do you have analytics linked with Adsense to see more info such as what feed brought you the most money, which feed was not very good in terms of site engagement etc?
Have you tried Israel? Chances are that even if the clicks weren’t invalid, you still wouldn’t have made it profitable with India.
Hi Stephen again,
I was just thinking to create a basic site on insurance as it has very high CPC rate. Do you think that if I set up a new domain and post few articles on that topic and drive traffic to it then even few clicks will generate amazing revenue. Also is it necessary that traffic needs to be from Google to get good CPC. Should I go for .com or country specific domain like .us or .uk. Is it ok to have let say .us domain and traffic is from different countries like Thailand, France etc. Will it get higher CPC in that case. Let me know it. Also from which countries you are getting higher CPC in your adsense account through push notification traffic. Let me know it.
That niche could bring you a higher CPC but is not always the case like I said previously there are many things impacting the CPC, you might even see a lower CPC and then can’t figure out what’s going on… In general, though, it should give you a higher CPC than let’s say an image site or tech site.
Go for the .com, always. Check out my guide on how to choose a domain name if you need more help. The .com/.uk/.us/.org extension does not matter CPC wise, but it does matter a bit when trying to rank a site, and when you want to sell it later or if people will trust your brand.
About my countries, I couldn’t really say, it’s always changing… plus I’m doing a mix of native arbitrage and push arbitrage so it’s really hard to distinguish between the two. In any case, if I target US I can get $0.5-$1.5 clicks, but I don’t target US anymore, I more or less target almost the whole world, some days, for example, Israel could be my top earner other days it’s South Korea. So it depends.
I checked your traffic status on http://siteworthtraffic.com. It is not exactly correct but it just gives a general idea. Also I had a question on something that I forgot to ask. When we are sending traffic to Adsense site whether it is from push notification or native ad then is it necessary that the majority of the traffic needs to be from English countries to avoid spam and invalid clicks in general. I heard this thing all the time. Can we have a site that just gets traffic from non English speaking countries. Will that not be OK. Also Is there any specific countries ( Push notification traffic ) that you would recommend for Adsense site when it comes to health and fitness niche that can be highly beneficial. Also please write an article on adsense arbitrage quickly. Can not wait for it. Look forward to your reply soon.
Haha that site is fake as fck. The stats are totally not reliable. My traffic is nowhere near what they claim, in reality, is much lower.
You can use a multilingual plugin for wordpress and have articles in other languages on the same time. I tested that a few times and it worked ok. I also buy traffic from all the countries regarding of their language. I just set “English” as a language in every ad network I use, and if the user’s browser or computer is in English that means he/she understands what I’m saying. But that’s just my tactic 🙂
For countries well I don’t do health and fitness that much these days… but to be honest any country works, it depends more on their CPC over all. For example India or Brazil will have kinda the same adsense CPC regardless of niche. You also need to keep in mind that most of the ads you will have on the site will be from retargeting, meaning that they won’t even be about health all the time, but rather sites that your users visited in the past..
The arbitrage article is coming, I’ve just been a bit busy these past days…
Cheers,
Stephen
Hi Stephen as always,
Of course I am here to make you bore with my questions. Lol. Anyway, This site is a brand new site and you have an amazing articles on it. I was just shocked to see the amount of traffic it is getting having only few articles. How you are getting traffic on it. I mean from which sources you are getting from it and which countries you are targeting for this one. I was just astonished by the traffic numbers. Are you monetizing this site in any form. Btw, When you are coming with the next article that I am eagerly waiting for. Look forward to your reply soon.
Haha, that’s great that you spied my site, btw what tool did you use? Because I don’t really have really good numbers lol… Anyway, I’m not targeting any particular country but most of my traffic is from the US, UK, AU. All the traffic is organic (meaning from Google search) and free. Some of it is also from social media since users are liking and sharing my stuff.
Monetization is not really that much at the moment, I only focus on growing my email list and I will see after that… I had launched a couple of courses and products in the past even before I had this blog, so I might cook up some course in the future who knows. At the moment I just have a few affiliate links here and there, like the bing ads promo, trackers, etc…
Hi Stephen again,
I have one site on health and fitness that include topics like Yoga,weight loss, workout, healthy eating etc. It has Adsense ads on it. What countries are you gonna recommend. I was thinking to go for India but as you mentioned that the CTR and CPC is terrible so I am looking for another option. At the moment I am thinking for Israel just because the CPC on megapush is $0.002. I don’t know what the CPC rate is on propellerads for Israel so just need your little bit guidance on it which countries I should target for making profit. As I mentioned that my niche is based on health and fitness. I know there are a lot of factors that goes into that to break even or to make a profit but your experience will help me a lot as I do not have big capital to try and tweak the things so your reply will help me a lot. Look forward to hearing from you soon.
The CPC on Propeller is a minimum of $0.005 for every country. So it’s much better to use MegaPush if you want cheaper clicks in some countries. But I didn’t do that much arbitrage on MegaPush, in fact I only did it like 2-3 times and I only did it in the US… 1 time I broke even, the other time I made a profit and the 3rd time I lost money. I don’t blame MegaPush for that because I still use them for various CPA offers, but I simply blame the US push traffic in general, as I’m not doing promothing anything in the USA anymore across all push traffic networks…they don’t convert well for me.
For Israel I’m getting $0.35 average CPC in adsense, but their CTR is also a bit on the lower side, so the CTR depends on your ad positions and of course the advertisers and if they have good ads etc to increase CTR.
I understand your funds are low, and this can also be a problem because you won’t be able to test as much and also if you have for example a total of $100, you invest them all, maybe test 2-3 things out, but only end up making $50 back in AdSense what do you do then?
Also keep in mind that AdSense pays very very late, so if you invest money every day for the whole month of March, you will only be able to get your money back at the end of April, which kinda sucks when you’re doing arbitrage as it limits the amount of traffic you can purchase, and sometimes you might not even have funds to send traffic for the whole month and the other month before you get paid.
So it’s definitely very tricky and hard at the beginning, especially without much funds.
Now, of course, I can’t give you an exact formula on how to get successful from the first time with arbitrage, as even I messed up and had to learn the hard way what works and what doesn’t. You have to remember that there are many things that can improve your profit, even the slight adjustment to an ad position or ad style can make or break your profits.
But to give you a general idea: Stay away from US, AU, NZ, UK, CA, traffic. It’s just too expensive and too limited to break any profit.
Yes, you could try Israel, which is a good option for low CPC in megapush and high CPC in AdSense, but again the CTR, niche etc, all play an important role.
I did have 1 site that was doing very good with arbitrage on Israel, the other 2 sites were losing money on israel… so as you can see not even me could make the other 2 profitable…sure I could’ve tested more angles and articles but I’m testing so many campaigns, AdSense, CPA, affiliate etc…that I simply don’t have time anymore lol.
The funny thing is that the site that was profitable with Israel was in a “fun” niche and nothing serious like health or fitness related sites (one of my arbitrage is also in health), and funnily enough the health site did badly on Israel arbitrage. But I’m not saying this to discourage you, I’m saying that you should try and see what happens, and if it doesn’t work try out another country.
Let’s say you have $100, the minimum for MegaPush.
You could test 10 campaigns for $10 each right? Of course, you don’t need to create all 10 campaigns at the same time because that would be a stupid thing to do since you don’t know which will be profitable at first.
But you can try one on Israel if it doesn’t work well try and tweak the ads on site if it’s still not working well end the campaign. Then you can try to advertise a different article on Israel or chose to go and create another campaign in another country for example in Philliphines, Thailand, Singapore, Ukraine or anything else that has a cheap CPC in megapush.
I think MegaPush has cheaper clicks for Desktop traffic than mobile, right? So you could do a campaign only on desktop and get a ton of cheap traffic for $0.001-0.002 in specific countries, usually CPC is higher on desktop in AdSense, it depends though.
The funny thing is that you have all the info you need inside megapush, if you see a country that has a cheap CPC (keep it under $0.005 at beginning, preferably find countries between $0.001 and $0.003) you could try and spend $5 – $10 on it and see how it works with your article and website. This is how you find real winners. You can even stop the campaign faster than spending $10 if you see them not clicking on ads or not making enough if you really want to save money, but leaving them to work for a while can also increase CPC.
For example I have profitable campaigns that are running in Guam, Turkey, Iran, Namibia, Puerto Rico, Mauritius and countries that people never advertise in, sure the CPC in adsense isn’t big in fact it’s under $0.1 a lot of the times even $0.05. But they are still profitable, it just depends highly on your site and niche I’m afraid, and you need to test things out. Again the only real good advice I could give you for this, if you have limited funds is to stick to the cheapest traffic you could buy (except India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia) and think outside the box.
I hope this helps, Good luck.
Stephen
Hi Stephen once again,
I was just curious to know before your Adsense arbitrage article comes up. When you are promoting an article with push notification traffic then from which devices you get the most clicks on Adsense ad. Is it desktop,mobile or tablet. Same question with the native ad traffic. Also there are many factors that how much money it will generate from Adsense like traffic source, niche, content etc. But on an average let say you spend $10 on push notification traffic and native ad traffic. How much revenue it will generate in both cases in general from Adsense. I am thinking to target India on megapush where CPC is very low like $0.002 or $0.003. Is it possible to make $20 from Adsense while spending $10 on push notification traffic. Also check out froggyads.com. The CPC rate is good enough.Anyway, Look forward to hearing from you soon.
Hi Jimmy,
Well like you already know, the adsense rate depends a lot. It’s not an exact science, I’m doing it for the past 3-5 years now ON and OFF on different sites and it always differs.
For example: The same article on the same site, running the same ads and everything is the same right? For $10 spent I get $20 today yeah? Good. Well, tomorrow for the same thing from $10 spent I get $15 or $14 without me changing anything. Then on another day from the same $10 invested I can get $25 or even $28-$30.
It’s all very weird and I think the days also matter for example most advertisers won’t probably run ads on google on Sunday, so weekend ad revenue might be lower etc…
But to answer your question… for me personally, it depends because I have 3-4 websites that I do arbitrage on, and I’m building the 5th one now. Every one of them is different, I use multiple ad sources and countries for all of them, and with some campaigns, I do lose money (meaning that if I spend $10 I get back $2 lol).
Overall I would say that from Push Traffic I get back 1.5 – 2 times my money back, and from native (even though I’m doing more push traffic nowadays than native) but from native I get 2.5-3 times my money back. (not always the case, there’s always some bot traffic that can ruin things a bit) But at the end of the month, I also have to take a look at how much money I lost doing experiments with new articles in new countries etc, so I always lose some money for testing.
Now for India, I don’t know man… I did multiple tests on India and for me I never got them profitable as much as I wanted. But I also tested it more on PropellerAds than MegaPush, because I knew about PropellerAds before MegaPush, but I guess it’s the same on MegaPush too. Because I would pay $0.002 or $0.005 in propeller for India, and never make 2 times my money back, because the CPC in adsense was something like $0.02 – $0.04 and the CTR was bad too, in fact, the best case scenario with India was when I broke even (meaning that I spent $10 I got back $10).
So I stopped doing India, although it’s sad because India and Brazil have a lot of cheap traffic but can’t make them to convert well for arbitrage, I even wrote Portuguese articles for Brazil and still failed many tests 😀
With push I target mostly mobile because they have more mobile traffic, with native I target desktop if the CPC is worth it, because you usually pay more for native desktop traffic ($0.05-$0.1 per click for US desktop), so the website ads need to perform good to be able to make a profit with native desktop, but yeah that’s usually what I do.
I also target some desktop on push but very little, like 90% traffic I buy from push is mobile.
Cheers,
Stephen
Hi, Stephen!
I’d like to read an article on Google Adsense arbitration. I’ll wait
You have very interesting content.
Regards, Aleks!
Hi Aleks,
Yes, the Adsense arbitration article is coming soon 🙂 so subscribe if you want to be notified when it’s up on the site.
Cheers,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
Was just waiting for it and it was just amazing to read. I have a few questions about ad placement. Can we place a leaderboard ad ( 728*90 ) on a site that is probably called a header ad I think and
automatic responsive ad that starts with title of the article and below that there is an image and then automatic responsive ad and then there a full article. Are both these placement violate Adsense policies. I tried to find answer of it but could not get actually. What are your thoughts on this. Also I wanna know when you are using a site like revcontent,content.ad etc to drive traffic to your site that involves a lot of bot traffic then how you get an idea of that and how you separate the good traffic which is human traffic from the bad once that is bot traffic. I mean, How you are keeping your adsense account safe while promoting a site and having a mix of good and bad traffic for so long.
Also are you gonna recommend any plugin that can keep our Adsense account safe from the bot traffic. I thought you would mention something like this in the post but nevertheless it was a great article to read.
Hi Jimmy,
Nice to see you again enjoying my articles. You’re right I forgot to talk about some things and trust me I know… I specifically forgot about what AdSense plugins to use to insert ads to your site, and also a few more things… but the post was already 4600+ words long and I forgot lol. Will have to update it today or tomorrow for sure.
Anyway regarding your questions:
I think there might be some issues with that ad setup, mainly that it will push the content below the fold, and also the responsive ad that appears after the image can be against their rules too.
Here’s what Google means by ads that push content below the fold (Basically you added so many ads that visitors will see more ads than content when they first enter your site and they will have to scroll down a little to find the text and main article).
See these 2 examples that I took from Google’s Ad Placement Policies (Read it here)
and also:
As you can see, the ad setup that you described can be violating some of these rules, mainly that you have too many ads first with just a title and images that push the real content below the fold and then the ad after the image can also be seen as misleading and against their policy.
For the bot traffic question, well I didn’t include that into this article because it’s not the AdSense arbitrage article it’s just a more general guide for people who are getting started with adsense, so I didn’t want to confuse them with something that most of them will never do (buy traffic for adsense sites) So I will have to talk about this in another article that will be all about AdSense arbitrage entirely.
But to keep it simple, I never used a service against bot traffic for my adsense sites, and I even had multiple $300+ days in AdSense doing arbitrage and never had a problem, however as I say always, this does not mean that it will be the same for you and Google won’t give you warnings etc… as much as I know…
I do have a certain amount of money that is deducted from my payment at the end of the month for invalid clicks, but it’s not that much, for example, let’s say I earn $1000 this month in AdSense and it was all from arbitrage… I think Google will deduct about $20-$25 from that for invalid clicks, and other than that I never had any other problems or warnings from them, this without using any plugins or services.
I just block the bad traffic sources really fast and constantly monitor my analytics and adsense and if I see a network that is sending me a lot of traffic that’s bouncing really fast and not clicking on anything I immediately block it using the IDs that I get from the UTM tags that I use when I create my ads inside those native networks.
Sometimes I started promoting things on that ad network that are not adsense websites, for example, affiliate and CPA offers, and I just create a white list and a blacklist of good and bad publisher IDs from that, and I use those for when I’m doing AdSense arbitrage. You could also try and do this, although you will lose some money, at least it’s an extra step that you can do to better protect your account, plus you have the chance to also earn money with another method and in another network with CPA/affiliate products, which is also good.
You can also spy on your competition and see where they post their arbitrage ads and on what sites, and manually create a list of good sites and IDs that you can use inside your desired ad network (this is a bit more complicated though, you have to use a native ad spy tool and then go to each website and view the source of the page and search for it’s native ID that they use with RevContent etc, and usually that is the ID that you can then block or whitelist inside your ad network, like I said this sounds a bit more complicated and I’m not sure I’ve explained it to you well lol)
Anyway like I said I will have to add these things and more in a new post about AdSense arbitrage only… so you will have to wait a little bit more for that if you’re curious about arbitrage more.
Hope my answers help you Jimmy.
Cheers,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
Thanks very much for taking the time in answering my question. Though there is still one and hope you can spare a minute of your precious time on this.
Question: Does google adsense policy requires to declare in our website that it is affiliated with Google Adsense, just like what Amazon does?
Thanks again for your time Stephen.
More power!
Sam
Hey Sam,
To be honest, I don’t think so (not 100% sure though), but I do know that you need to specify that you share your user data with Google Adsense and other 3rd parties in your privacy policy. Also, I always use a small text like ADVERTISEMENT before an ad, so I never had any problems so far.
In any case, I’ve never seen a website using Adsense to have that text in the footer like the ones using Amazon, so I don’t think that’s required, but the privacy policy one is.
I hope this helps, but yeah you should check it out also since I’m not 100% sure about it.
Cheers,
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
Thanks again for taking the time in answering my question.
If ever we have several websites and plan to monetize the traffic with adsense, do we have to seek approval from Google to add adsense code in each individual website, by submitting all the websites to them?
Best regards and more power!
Sam
Hi Sam,
For many years, you only needed to have an AdSense account and you could then just copy/paste the ad codes on every website you owned without resubmitting it to Google.
From last year though they changed that, so now every website you have, you need to add it into your AdSense account first, and wait for it to get verified and approved before you can put ads on them. So, unfortunately, yeah, you need every website approved now.
Good luck,
Stephen