Website Traffic and Pageviews

The only way you are going to make money with advertising on the internet is if you have an audience. You need people to visit your website and in the case of Google AdSense, some small portion of those people need to click on your ads. If nobody clicks your ads, then you aren't going to make money. That's just the way it is.

On average anywhere from 1-10% of your visitors might click on an ad, so just to be safe assume some low number like 1%. To calculate how much your ads are worth, you can take the cost per click and multiply it by the number of clicks you can expect to get based on your traffic. So, if you have 100 page views and a click through rate of 1%, you will get 1 click on average. If your CPC (cost per click) is $1, then you might make $1 per 100 page views. The same formula is used to determine CPM, which is the cost per 1,000 ad views. In the case of the above estimate, you are looking at a CPM of $10.

Now, given an average CPM, it becomes pretty obvious how traffic impacts how much money you can make with Google AdSense. At $10 CPM, you need 10,000 pageviews to make $100. Next time you see a picture of someone holding up an AdSense check, think about how much traffic they needed to make that money. For many people, it is not possible to get that much traffic.

The question for you is, how much traffic do you think you can get to your website? How much are you already getting? Traffic is going to play a big role in how much money you can make from Google AdSense.