In short, at my new job - I'm responsible for managing the AdWords account. We have a budget of $225/day to spend, and many (if not most) of the keywords are paying off $1.50 or so (some go up to a few dollars). It's worth it for the conversions and sales leads we get. However it leads me to the question of why AdSense seems to pay off so poorly...whoever is running our ads is having a really good day - surely there must be other small businesses (or large corporations) that are spending a lot on AdWords, why isn't it the norm for people to be getting at least $1 per click? (this post isn't pertaining to ringtone, video and online game sites, whose genre makes and spends nothing) I'd imagine that the number of business, marketing, training, etc related sites using AdSense would be pulling in these numbers on a fairly steady basis...?
If you mention on which niche you're bidding on in adwords, it can appear clear or not if this niche is a good one for adsense or not. It's something financial, then yes publishers are getting high earnings per click. Is it "business, marketing, training" ? Me I'm not into financial, health, real estate, insurance, business, marketing, training so nothing which pays better. The problem is nobody knows what is the publisher's share and I guess it is not fixed!
AdWord is set to run on google search and google content network. You know when you set keywords you have to set a particular price of X before you can even show ads for that keyword. That error "Please increase your bid" or "your ads are not showing". If you go into the settings of the campaign and unlist Google Search Network. All thoes errors go away, so you can run keywords on the content network for 1c a click. I did it, and i manged to get 70,000 impressions, and 20 clicks on my ads for $2. Literaly thousands and thousands of keywords. Thats why payout for AdSense publishers is so low. Google made AdWords for advertising on Google SERPS pages, not on AdSense. Pierce
Senserely - yes, it's in the field of business & training. Obviously, we aren't even paying as much as some of our competitors are, per click. Some of our clicks have paid off up to $10 so far! Pierce, I know what you mean - I tried that trick for my own site about a year ago, with the same results. The problem is that you appear well off of column 1 of AdWords. However, you do get that small handful of penny clicks. I just can't understand how any business would do something like that. All of our ads are in positions 1-2 currently.
I can understand why you want to be 1 or 2. But you pay more to be on that spot. $225 is a nice budget to play with. Not a whole lot of people have that budget. So your shelling out $1.50 a click which is 150 clicks. Being the top position I bet you can max out that budget pretty quick. So you have the large publisher, small publisher. Obviously google is going to cater more for the bigger publishers because its thoes publishers that are worth investing in. And as such they will get more of the expensive clicks. Also not everybody has as much money. But from my experience, larger publishers shy away from content networks and stick with googles search index which has much lower click fraud and thus will convert better. Makes more sense when your in the game for making money not giving it away. From my experience my Ads averaged 4.5 to 5 position, for 15c clicks on the content network. For google search it was well over 80c minimum bids, which was unfesable. Pierce
I wish AdWords & AdSense would work in tiers...maybe showing up on pages based on page rank or stature, I don't know. It's just total BS to have penny ads and $10 ads in the same pot.