High Revenue Site vs Low Revenue Site – by Browser

 

AdSense Statistics

The first statistic I find interesting and common between high and low revenue AdSense blogs is the browser used by the visitor.  There is a significant difference in the browser used in high vs low revenue blog sites.  Which browsers do you think are associated with higher revenue AdSense sites?

I probably would have guessed IE or Safari because in my opinion they are used by less technical readers.  And one common truth is that high-tech readers are “ad blind”, they don’t see the ads and are able to filter them out of the content as useless whereas the non-technical visitors tend to view the ads and content as the same thing.  This is a generalization, but the idea is backed by plenty of evidence.

There is an extensive (and newer) article on RPM here, called AdSense RPM for Maximum Earnings.

Update Jan, 2015 – I’ve added some comments to this article which was written around 2 years ago. All comments are clearly marked and reflect my improved AdSense skills and perceptions.

Low Revenue/Earnings Adsense Site Statistics

IE, Firefox & Chrome are the majority browser for visitors to DisplacedGuy.com, and this blog is my lowest AdSense Revenue earning blog sites  it doesn’t even come close to making enough money to cover the hosting costs, and it is somewhat of a bandwidth hog compared to other sites I run.  From a purely business perspective– this would be the first site I should consider shutting-down but it has personal meaning to me.  I’ve met people here, received job referrals, learned career helping skills and had fun with the self-improvement process so I will probably never shut it down.

Less than one person in 1,000 click an ad on this site and the Adsense cost per click (CPC) is very low, in the ten or twenty cent range.

Update Jan, 2015: Actual statistics for Dec, 2014 show CPC has doubled to exactly $0.50 but the AdSense CTR (0.41%) & RPM ($2.04) are so horrible that this site is lucky to be a “break-even” on AdSense income. I believe that programming and making money online blogs are not good choices for making money online unless you are selling a product because the readers are too smart (that means you) and don’t click on advertisements. I would never want you to click an advertisement out of appreciation even though the gesture is very kind, unless you are buying a product from the advertiser or joining their site (providing value to them).  The reason fake clicks are a huge mistake because advertisers are your customers and Google’s customers, and you are essentially charging a customer for nothing!

Adsense Low Revenue Sites - Browser

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before we dig into the browser stats for my high revenue Adsense sites lets talk about how to measure a successful Adsense site.

 

Adsense revenue per mile (RPM) – gold standard for earnings potential

What is considered a “good” RPM for a profitable AdSense site?  This answer depends on the person, but generally speaking a profitable niche site does between $3 and $10 RPM with some super-niche sites doing far better.  Over time your idea of a successful site will change.

I’ve got about two years of sporadic experience with AdSense and my perceptions of a successful site have changed many times.  Also, when reading your RPM you need to look at averages over a period of time, at least 30 days because anything less will be unreliable due to daily fluctuations.

Update Jan, 2015: My perception of a successful RPM has changed again. I disagree with the numbers below based on my knowledge today and updated them but left the original value for you to see. Don’t get discouraged by reading this, it should encourage instead because over time you will also have higher expectations and be making a lot more money than you expected. You’d be surprised how easy it is to double or triple the RPM of a site and that means double or triple the income overnight by spending a day making updates to your ads and placement of them. This is NOT an exaggeration it is reality and I do it all the time, sometimes repeatedly for the same site. The best RPM I’ve seen over a 30 day period is $38 in Nov, 2014 (3.45% CTR, $1.10 CPC, $38.01 RPM, 2,287 Views, 79 Clicks, $86.92). Imagine having 50 sites like that one!  I like my day-job but might consider going out on my own if I felt the need to move my family to a more rural setting for obvious reasons. In my mind raising RPM is the easiest way to make more money faster once you have attained some content and traffic. If you want to learn how to raise your RPM see Increasing AdSense RPM for Maximum Income.

  • Under $1 $2 RPM is not worth the effort, if the site is hogging your bandwidth consider shutting it down, it is a weight holding you down.
  • Above $1 $2 RPM is a respectable site for a beginner, and has potential for being a decent earner with work.  I still keep sites above $1 RPM but eventually I will sell them or shut them down and focus on the high revenue sites.
  • Above $3 $5 RPM is a decent site with potential and worth putting extra effort into maximizing profit. Once you get here you have usually been messing with AdSense sites for a year and have learned many of the hard lessons.
  • Above $5 $10 RPM are good solid sites that if you should put time into maximizing profit.  $10 RPM for an AdSense blog is my target for a quick-setup, low effort blog site and it works out to exactly $1 per 100 visitors.  If you can repeat it on a regular basis and in the process hit some gold-nuggets of $20, $30 or $40 RPM then you’ve got real potential of saying goodbye to your boss in a few years– and making a fair living too (e.g. in six figures).
  • Above $10 $20 RPM are the Crème de la Crème sites that you should strive for but not expect.  Successful by most standards and IF there are ways of creating these on a regular basis I am definitely not aware of them and would be very thankful if you’d share some secrets if you know the answer.

A few disclaimers about my opinions above.  A site needs at least six months time and sometimes more before you can tell for sure if it will be successful. The first month or two the traffic can be very spotty and this is normal.  Success to one person might be failure to another so stay true to yourself and be happy with whatever you need. I am used to mid six figures but can live perfectly fine on half that amount.  I am probably not even considered “middle class” to the elite of America but I don’t really care as I have learned that time, family & friends mean more than dollars.

As you can see, I run AdSense on three blogs including a niche blog. The Page RPM values for me vary from 3 to 5 at the moment – from a blogger at dollarshower.com 

As you can see from Page RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) column, United States is the highest paying Page RPM country in my top 10 estimated earnings.   – source SPBlogger.com Top Ten best paying country in Google Adsense

 

High Revenue/Earnings AdSense Site Statistics

IE, Safari & Android are the majority browser for visitors to one of my higher revenue AdSense sites.  The difference between the low revenue site and high revenue site is nearly 1,000% as measured with AdSenses’ RPM statistic (revenue per thousand impressions, commonly referred to as “Revenue Per Mile”).

From my perspective IE is not a good predictor of whether the visitor is one that “facilitates” AdSense sites.   Another observation is that Chrome seems to be the strongest indicator of a poor performing AdSense site because Chrome accounted for around 11% of the visitors on the high revenue site compared to over 30% on the low revenue site.  Is it possible that Chrome users are ad-blind like techies, or maybe techies like Chrome?

Safari and Android seem to be most associated with the high revenue blog sites, as 42% of the high revenue site visitors used Safari or Android.  The top winner for AdSense friendly browsers seems to be Safari where it accounts for only 3% of the visitors to the low revenue site but accounts for almost 29% of the high-revenue sites.

Safari accounts for almost a third of all visitors for my top performing AdSense site, the one that currently has an $8 RPM, and Safari accounts for only 3% for my super poor performing site with $0.50 RPM.

 

Adsense Sites with High Revenue - Visitor Browser

 

 

 

 

 

Top site is > $8 RPM for 30 day period compared to this site (DisplacedGuy.com) at only $0.52 RPM

When it comes to visitor browser the most significant indicator of good/bad RPM is Safari – so the million dollar question is how do you target visitors with the Safari browser… hmm..   shouldn’t be too difficult.  I may give that a try.

If you like the article, would you give me a google +1, or a share to help promote the site?  Site growth is dependent on community and helping your neighbors.  There is plenty of money go around for all of us.

 

Successful Adsense entrepreneur’s secret to success

 

Just do it, create content and make money “Just do something…”, now that sounds easy enough, and is just common sense right?  Well I happen to just love statistics but sometimes  the best way to maximize Adsense revenue is to “just do something” and avoid falling into the trap of  excessive statistic “watching”.  

If you run any Adsense sites you must know what I’m talking about.  Checking your Adsense account twice a day to see how much money you’ve earned, and letting those good or bad days define your mood isn’t productive and won’t change things.  If you are thinking — twice a day, that isn’t so bad then you have to realize that I’m lying about the twice a day thing– and I really don’t know the real number of times it was.

If you really want to earn money while sleeping, or while you are at the beach then it takes some action.  So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some of those beautiful statistics.

 

What is a Good RPM for Adsense

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update Jan, 2015: Here is an updated image, it is for a single website from Jan 2012 to Jan 2015. You can see that about every six months my AdSense RPM was doubled and in the last six months the rate of increase accelerated because I continually focus on raising it by making adjustments to ads, placement, seo, etc.. This proves what I said that it is easy to double your AdSense RPM and that means you double your revenue and more than double profit.

Increase Income Via Adsense RPM

 


Related Articles:

Will your websites continue to generate revenue after you punch-out of the proverbial time-clock?  I ask myself this question as often, but not often enough.  There is more than enough room for everyone in this business so do the good thing and share information.  I’ve selected a few articles that are exceptionally popular and may help you maximize your AdSense income.


Decrease traffic to increase adsense RPM

Cut Blog Traffic and Increase AdSense Revenue

CPU-throttling was causing outages and the site was either not available or too slow to be useful and there was a marked drop in traffic and revenue so a decision needed …

Adsense High Revenue Site Vs Low Revenue Site RPM

3 Years of AdSense Actuals for DisplacedGuy

It has been almost three years since I started posting actual Google Analytics and AdSense statistics for DisplacedGuy.Com.  See how the sites AdSense income progressed from pennies, to dollars, and then …


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32 Responses

    • Cool. I am glad to hear that I helped. What is your site? What monetization methods are you using? I just started using Amazon and love it. Everyone loves shopping at Amazon and the money can be pretty good. I have a widget on the side of my site where I placed items I personally like and other “techies” tend to like the same thing so when they buy from Amazon they get the same great deal and I get a percentage of purchases even if they purchase outside of the items I posted. 🙂

  1. I am happy with my, in your opinion low RPM. (okey, promising) I have a very reliable host, a VPS that is hosting only “serious business” except me, so i can hoard all the traffic I need and get a little something by traffic. The sysadmin bitches a bit about my memory usage from time to time, but since nobody else needs all that traffic we can use, the match is made in heaven for now! if you get many visitors, it really doesn’t mater of your RPM is low.

    I have learned quite fast that there is absolutely no point top check adsense earning more then 4-5 times every week. The earings updates way too slow. It is much more fun to have the real time analytics running on a big fat screen in the middle og the room……

    • It seems that in general readers don’t click ads, so I’m finding that it takes big numbers to make much money, plus experiment, and adjust, then repeat and you will slowly grow your RPM and ultimately earnings. It used to take forever for me to reach $100 and get paid from Google, but now it seems to hit $100 before I know it. Patience and persistence will pay off. I’ll stop by and visit your site, thanks for stopping by.

  2. I’m just starting out and make a pretty low RPM through Adsense. However, I think it is low due to having non-targeted ads in my niche. Competitors are direct selling ads at $30-40 CPM! Do you know of any sites / niches where Adsense is actually holding revenue back?

    • I sure wish that I did know the answer to that question. I usually do research with Googles Adwords planning tools, kind of pretend like I were the one wanting to place ads, and see where it is expensive, then see how much competition there is. Also look for niches that people visit when they are likely to spend money (e.g. septic pumping) and they won’t waste any time. Part of it is a crap shoot, just try and then try again. Good luck. I’ll keep sharing my ideas, please do the same. 🙂

  3. Incredible, great weblog construction! The length of time have you ever been posting for? you made blog view quick. The complete look of your web page is great, not to mention this content!

  4. what if i tell you that i have 29€ RPM pages with a 21%ctr and 0,14cpc average? Oh, most important thing, i respected the policy of google.

    • Hi Dimitri, Well I’d say your CPC is unusually small. Seriously though I assume the reply was created because you believe that I am not respecting the policy of Google. I do admit to being guilty of breaking the policy when I first started blogging. It was due to ignorance. All of my articles have been updated, they do not identify any one website so the information is considered meta-data and therefore does not violate the policy. I respect the privilege to work with Google and I believe they can already tell that my sites are well into the “legitimate” area compared to many. By the way your stats are great, kudos!

    • Hi Rob, Thank you very much for taking the time to reply — and with such useful information too. These are the replies that I dream about, and everyone reading the articles probably does too. If we all share information together we can all improve and succeed together. I really love your site layout, love the huge tall sky-scraper on the home-page and the overall look of the site! Great job. Is this your first blog, or do you have many? A $4 RPM is pretty impressive, also noticed that your site must be fairly new as it didn’t have a lot of history on alexa.com. But seeing as how you are doing that kind of RPM you should work on pulling in more traffic now so you can start cranking up the income. Basically every thousand pages you are bringing in about $4, I assume you probably have a click-through rate of a couple percent on a site like that, curious what your CPC is. Anyway thanks for sharing, if you have any questions, or want to know more about my sites just ask. I am a computer programmer and working on a program to help manage sites, and examine them to determine why one article does better than another. For some reason the Add 1000 backlinks in a day article does great on my site and for the life of me I can’t figure out why– because I don’t think it is night and day better than the other articles. I have one site that does decent traffic but in the last few months ZERO income, wonder if my Adsense code is broken, it is otown411.com, and I’ve been averaging over 1,000 views a week which isn’t great but I’d expect at least a few ad-clicks but get none. Take care! Rich

    • Hi Rob, That is pretty impressive. Your site is nice and clean too — I like it. Thanks for sharing. I hope more people do the same. I think others like to see examples so this allows people to “market” their sites while adding useful content to my article. Thanks again! I’ll try to help share your content from time to time. Sincerely, Rich

  5. Thanks for the info. I have to say I am a little concerned now! I fall below the $1 RPM and 40% or my traffic is from Chrome. Are there any tips to capture a more profitable audience?

    • Mobile optimization is key, I’ve found that mobile ads are much higher performing than desktop in most cases – with tablet being the highest. How do you target mobile users? Mobile responsive website with responsive ads (there is a responsive Google ad unit or you can use JavaScript)

      • I suspected that Mobile optimization was important but your comment made me curious so I checked my actual AdSense revenue breakdown by platform (for Dec ’14 – Jan ’15) and the data confirms (in a huge way) that you are spot-on correct. The mobile and tablet platform is 300% & 500% higher AdSense RPM respectively meaning three to five times more money on the same number of page views as desktop visitors.
        Platform —— CTR — CPC — RPM —- Earnings % ——
        Desktop —— 0.72% — $0.82 — $5.91 — 45%
        Mobile ——- 1.64% — $0.98 — $15.99 — 39%
        Tablets —— 2.41% — $1.02 — $25.38 — 16%
        Nice comment and observation! Thank you.

      • I don’t really target mobile users, I just naturally get them from social media channels. I got a fully responsive WP site http://www.telltalesonline.com, and I got 43% mobile users, 8% tablet so I guess its a large portion of my traffic!
        Not too sure on the location of my ads on mobile. My sidebar ads appear very low down, so I put the Google link ads at the end of posts. My next thing to try is in the middle of posts…

      • Thank you for the feedback. Targeting Social Media is something I’ve learned late in the game and am learning the value of. One question I have– how often do you “Tweet” articles? I used to Tweet new articles one time, but my publishing friend said I should be doing it something like once a day for new articles and less often for older articles. I tried re-tweeting new articles and the days that I do– there is usually a noticeable bump in RPM, Views, Earnings so I suppose it amounts to finding the perfect balance of Tweeting until I notice followers dropping off meaning too much tweeting. FWIW, I have great success with StackOverflow, it is good for tech articles because if you answer a question you can embellish on the answer in a blog post. The majority of social visitors to this site is via StackOverflow but most of my non tech sites is Twitter or Facebook. Not sure if Google is being nice to me or if I’m just having good luck as RPM is still climbing on all sites — approaching $30 on some which is pretty nice. I’ve been using a tool, and it is somewhat expensive and considering “selling” it as affiliate because it is well worth the value and a large reason why I’ve been able to double/triple RPM’s lately. One site, otown411.com is horrendous for RPM and for the life of me I can’t figure out why– must just be really bad keywords or my Adsense code is whack. If anyone sees a problem with that site I’d be forever indebted to you. It gets fair traffic but CTR so low it is likely killing my relationship with Google but I there is enough traffic (plus I’m interested in the content) that I hate to just trash the site– it’s for sale to the best offer– guess I didn’t do a good sales job on it. The pure truth. 🙂

    • Don’t be discouraged, by now your expectations have probably changed and they will continue to change. I don’t think the browser is all that important but it may be a hint that your content is focused more towards a “technical” or “educated” audience and those tend to be lower RPM. Writing about Cats and Coupons is going to offer a much higher RPM than writing about making money online or something like that. If you’ve max’ed out your RPM than it might be your niche/topic, use Google AdWords tool to find better paying/ranking keywords.

      How can you raise your RPM? I’ve got some articles on the subject but generally speaking, you can easily double your RPM over night by getting the right combination of ads, ad sizes, positioning, etc. I love 728×90 as top banners, I love 200×200 inside articles, I do very well with 338×220 inside articles but I think they look terrible, I used to avoid the latter size because it was so ugly but once I started — could not refuse the money they generate.

      Here is my breakdown of RPM by Ad Size- hope this helps. Keep up the work, persistence usually pays off. If you are a techie I will give you a secret, write a little app or widget (e.g. some calculator, tool, etc.) and surround it with ads. You will be able to generate good income without needing to waste so much time writing articles. I have one site where I put almost zero effort into it now that it is written and it continues to make more and more money! Interestingly my Responsive ad size does poorly and I will probably remove it– wasn’t worth the headache

      Ad Size—— CTR — CPC — RPM —- Earnings % ——
      200×200—— 1.99% — $1.03 — $20.41 — 15%
      120×600—— 0.83% — $1.53 — $12.72 — 13%
      320×100—— 1.40% — $0.54 — $07.62 — 04%
      336×280—— 0.92% — $0.65 — $05.98 — 11%
      728×90-—— 0.34% — $1.16 — $03.93 — 39%
      468×15 LU 0.30% – $0.65 – $02.80 – 09%
      Other ….. minimal

    • I’d say your subject has more to do with audience. For example the audience of this site is a tough one, even with a lot of tweaking I’ve increased the RPM to around $1-2 RPM and an abysmal 1% CTR. This sounds cruel, but start another blog for a subject where most readers are not technical, and where they will likely be making a purchase. One wild example, Septic Pumping, if someone is searching for that– they NEED to spend money — and when someone needs to spend money they will be clicking ads, and the CPC will be higher. 😉 Another example, water heater leaks, you could write for water-heater keywords, and heavily monetize with Amazon too, write about products and have links to Amazon. But this subject is well covered, just an example.

      • I have just started to look into the Amazon avenue and product type articles with little success so far. I have another affiliate account “MrSkin” which could do well with my more “revealing” articles! I’m yet to try it but I do get a lot of visitors from words like “explicit” and “sexy” from search engines. So it seems like promoting more adult material, posters is something I should try too I guess…

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