Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If I dedicated a website to "blue widget" could I expect to get 1% of that traffic, or 2460 visitors per month. From there, could I expect 1% to click on my google ads, or 24.6 conversions. If I then expect 1% commission, or $.0245 ($2.45 CPC x .01), my monthly income from the 24.6 clicks would be $0.6027, or just about 60 cents. If I expect a 5% commission, it bumps up to about $3/month. If I expect a 20% commission, it bumps up to about $12/month.
Based on your collective experience, is this calculus reasonable or totally off-base? Are these commission rates realistic?
[edited by: martinibuster at 1:37 am (utc) on July 23, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed specifics. [/edit]
But your formula sounds pretty much right.
The adsense lesson is - you need more traffic :)
One thing you have not considered is that general keyword phrases can mean different things. Especially the phrase you mentioned.
A second consideration is that the estimated average CPC is not reliable because there are a number of factors that can depress the price of a click, aka smart pricing.
A third consideration is that you actually have to rank for that phrase in order to generate ads for it, but not EVERYONE accessing that page is accessing it via your pet phrase. What that means is that different ads relative to the queries are showing, not necessarily the phrase you are optimizing for.
A fourth consideration is that the CPC for the content network, particularly for competitive phrases, in general are going to be significantly lower than the search network because of lack of competition, possibly because conversions take more work and thought than the average advertiser is capable of at this time.
Go wide
There are SEVERAL more reasons why your calculation will not be accurate but that's not as important as suggesting you to create a website that is broad and encompasses multiple subtopics within your niche, with many articles written for each of these related subtopics. You may find there will be some pages with stronger earnings than others. So the more pages you make the more chance there is that another page will become a super page bringing in a large share of the total income. But that's not to deny the earning power of the smaller pages put together.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:04 am (utc) on July 23, 2008]
While many of us might dream of hitting it big with a big volume phrase, for the most part that's pretty unrealistic - especially in the short term.
I know that I depend on long tail traffic. I don't have a big money phrase, but I've got thousands of long-tail phrases each month. For example, my top phrase only generates around 0.5% of my total traffic each day.
And while I don't enjoy the pride that comes with knowinig I own a big phrase, I do have a bit of security knowing that if Google decides to drop me 4 spots, my traffic isn't going to drop by 50%.
As mentioned by martinibuster, you can do quite well by looking wide. There are a lot of stories like mine around here.
On my main site, for example, pretty exactly 50% of the visitors via search engines have the main keyword in their search term but they end up with about 37% of AdSense income for that site.
Or, in other words, almost two-third of my AdSense income comes from visitors not searching for the main keyword.
(EPC from those is lower, but CTR much higher.)
The results indicate an average search volume of 246,000 per month.
And how much do you believe this?
I have one site specifically targetted to my widget product of keyword1keyword2keyword3 and the domain name is keyword1keyword2.tld.
According to the keyword tool this 3 word phrase generated 73 enquiries during June however the reality for me is that this phrase is generating up to 100 enquires per DAY to my site alone.
I use the GKT only to view their interesting combinations of phrases used especially by UK/USA/AU/NZ/IN etc English users. It sometimes does throw up some interesting suggestions however to rely upon it for total accuracy would not be the best idea IMHO.
If I dedicated a website to "blue widget" could I expect to get 1% of that traffic
What that means is that different ads relative to the queries are showing, not necessarily the phrase you are optimizing for.
Interesting, I never knew that. As always MB you offer some great insight.
