I don't know if I am stating the obvious here , or is it something that is unclear to people who play only the AdSense/content side and don't give much thought to CPC , the service that is "behind AdSense" , AdWords. (The following is based on my own logic and brief experience , so feedback is more than weclome) There are plenty of high paying keywords with bid of 20$+ , but these are not put in the content network . Plain and simple . AdWords allows people to place completely different bids on Content and Search . Means I am willing to bid 20$ to get a visitor that searches "get a loan fast" , but will pay 0.2$ for a guy that clicks on an my advertisement next to "I want another black hamster , I better get a loan fast ... these things cost like 50$ each" forum post . Both Google and AdWords bidder understand that a content click is statistically of much lesser value than a "search" click . I am playing with clickbank , so sorta understand the reasoning behind paying 2$+ for an AdWords click . Now , 2$ CPC isn't 70$ , but 500 untargetted clicks of 2$ CPC would cost me 1k$ . And people that click on content ads ARE NOT SEARCHING for your site , they just happen to browse around ,and click an advertisement on some site that happens to contain certain keywords. These are not targeted visitors , and they probably have 20% the conversion rate that a "searcher" has . Conversion means getting the user to buy something , subscribe to a list , join a community , etc.. On the other hand , a person searching for "fast online Loan consolidation" in Google , has probably a 5% conversion rate , and might be worth paying 50$ for . And since people that pay 70$ per click usually took some time to think about what they are doing and probably have some professional managing their AdWords account , nobody is placing 50$ bids into the content network , which are the ads that are displayed by adsense . Hope this helps .
Thats mostly true, this must be very much useful for a lot of people worrying why I get only 2$ for my adsense where cost of the keyword is 50$!