Help! Can I Make Money From This Website with Adwords??

Thermidor

InsideInsurance wrote: »

eCPM is the earnings you get per 1,000 times the adverts are displayed. So I get £3 per 1,000 times the adverts are displayed, on average.

That will be made up of how many adverts you have on a single page (I have 1). What percentage of your visitors click an advert (CTR - click through rate) and the average fee paid per click (eCPC - earned cost per click)

As I get 3,000 page views per month with 1 advert per page I earn about £9 per month but obviously this varies.


With affiliate marketing most companies will want to review your site prior to agreeing to you advertising their products. They aren't interested in volumes, generally, but they are interested in ensuring you fit their brand/ products etc. If you operated a website on the KKK and thought advertising a washing powder would be a good idea as blood is a hard thing to get out of the white costume you'd probably find most washing powder companies would decline the application as they dont want the association.

Affiliate advertising's success will depend on a number of factors, the more you know about your customers the easier it is to find products they are going to be interested in. If your travel to Turkey site is about backpacking etc there is no point becoming an affiliate of a luxury travel brand like Kuoni.

The challenge with affiliate marketing is that you are also dependent on the ability of the company you are advertising to convert leads into sales. You could send them 5,000 people a month but if their site is bad or their pricing too high etc you wont get many sales. Most affiliate systems will show the average numbers to help you decide which are the best for you but of cause you dont know the quality of the leads others are sending.

I am not into Travel for websites so not in a position to give any clue of the possible income from 500,000 visitors a month

Hi,

Thanks for explaining that. So, you get £3 for every thousand visits to your page - even if they don't click on the ad - is that right?

And then you get more if people click on the ad?

Sorry if I seem to be asking the same question over and over - but I'm just trying to get the answer in simple terms (I've decided I'm incredibly thick so do forgive me)

I can understand about the affiliate marketing, and I can see why you'd earn more from that if a slae was made through your site. I suppose that's where the money's to be made?

Tnaks for being so patient!

Thermidor

paddyrg wrote: »

'Hits' are, strictly speaking, the number of object requests made against the server, and include graphics, style sheets etc - and as such are a meaningless figure. However people misunderstand that in several different ways, so some take hits to mean pages, some to mean unique objects, etc. Basically, if anyone is talking in 'hits', they are likely to be confused or flannelling you. Unique page impressions is useful (how many whole pages) and unique visitor numbers per month is useful, but those are both aggregated and imprecise figures. But don't get too hung up on those terms or measures, you should concentrate on writing good quality, regular, informative and engaging content that people will want to read, and do it for the sake of doing it - even if you get £25/month from it (before tax!!) It is a bonus that way.

As I mentioned, those who tell you you can make big cash from adverts online are trying to sell you something. Look at it like this, why would they try to sell you some crappy ebook if they are already making a fortune from online ads? They exaggerate (if I am feeeling kind) and lie (that's more like it) hoping to sucker people in.

I once had the dubious honour of seeing one of these 'internet guru' types giving a seminar. Some fairly interesting info in it, granted, but nothing as a technical type I didn't already know at a much deeper/systems level anyway, it was all about the marketing of ebooks. This guy was evasive with the truth in a major way. Not a liar per se, but the Bentley parked out front was on lease (he implied it was bought outright from the proceeds of one ebook), for instance, and similar representations of conspicuous wealth that weren't the real deal. Yes, he made a few quid from ebooks, but charged *thousands* for the 'advanced' seminar (the same material, plus where to buy original ebooks - basically indian ghost writers copying and aggregating stuff off wikipedia). He had 20 or so signups on that day - £40k made not through the business he represented, but from selling the illusion.

Hi Paddy,

You've been really helpful!

So 'hits' are not visits, then? I'll be honest, I read what you said about what 'hits' are but I'm still a bit confused. I thought hits were views on a particular website - is that not the case? As I'm sure you can tell, I'm not at all knowledgeable about these things.

Oh, I guessed these online guys who try and tell you that you can make thousands each month through Adsense are just trying to part you from your money.

What I really want to know is how much roughly can you make from a forum/blog website each month if you had, say, 500,000 visits a month? That's what I'm interested in knowing.

Someone told me they have 65,000 visits a month to their blog and about 1.5 million hits - which again - I don't understand!:o

paddyrg

Hits are not visits or page impressions. It is slightly complicated, but think of it like this -

A person visits your website (and is a unique visitor)
They view 3 of your pages but hit refresh twice on one of them (five page views, three unique page impressions)
Your page is made up of lots of objects [text, style sheet, javascript library, three photos, favicon, plus some formatting pixelgifs] - each of those is a 'hit' [something downloaded from the server] (so that might be 50 hits for the 5 views)

This is why 'hits' is a meaningless metric, if you have more images, you have more hits when a page is viewed. It is also so widely misunderstood and the term widely misused because it sounds good to non-technical types (people like big numbers). People quote 'hits', I just hear 'blah'!

BTW there is no perfect way to aggregate the number of unique visitors, so take these figures with a pinch of salt too. I could visit your site 10 times and show up as anything between 1 and 10 'unique' visitors, but then could view your pages from my own local cache and show up as not visiting at all!! If comparing figures between pages, make sure the methodology of counting is identical.

Also you will find many 'hits' and/or 'visitors' are bots and screenscrapers, not real people...but this is another discussion for another day!!

Thermidor

Hi Paddy,

Ah, I think it's starting to sink in now - you've explained it well to me. Thank you!

So it's visits (by each unique peron) that counts, and the hits are just how many times they've viewed different pages/images on your website or refreshed the page....I think I've got it. So in effect, just one person (visitor) could make 1000 hits in a day, say, if they kept looking on your site - that's how I'm reading it.

But it's the unique visit numbers which are the real guage of how much traffic you have coming in, I suppose.

Do you mind me asking, when you say a person could show up as between 1 and 10 different unique visitors, would that be even with the same log-in username, or would that be if your IP was different depending where you logged-in from?

Oh, another thing, I have heard of bots but don't reallu ynderstand them except they're some kind of electronic device watching your site - are screenscrapers the same as that - and how would you know they're a bot or screenscraper - could you tell by their ISP address or location or something? Can they harm your website in any way? Or are they like spies?

Finally, and I hate to press this, cos I feel really stupid to keep asking, but can I take it that the approximate Adsense income for about 500,000 visits a month would be in the region of just £25? That seems such a small amount? I suppose I could make a little more with affiliate advertising, but as it will take years and years to reach those visit figures, I probably wouldn't make much in the way of a profit even doing that.

I suppose it would just cover my running costs of the website?

Thanks so much again, you've been immensely helpful.

paddyrg

One person can (indeed will) generate a whole host of 'hits' just by visiting one page once. If you had a *REALLY* simple webpage, 1 visit would be 1 hit - but that page would not have any colour, graphics, images, script/interaction. As soon as a page gets more complicated (as any wordpress or other site will be) than 1 page visit might be 10, 20 or 50 'hits'. Without going into the details of how HTTP/HTML works (because with caching, it can all get more complicated) assume any 'hits' figure to represent a massively lower number of page views, and that number to represent a much lower number of unique visitors.

Bots are automatic programs that go round reading your website (screenscrapers are a variant of it often with a different motivation) often for indexing (eg to end up on google). They can/will follow every link on your site, so may represent ~100 'hits' each time they visit, and several bots may 'spider' (visit all the links on) your site every week. Again 'hits' are a meaningless measure for most people.

Depending on how it is aggregated, if I visited your site with 10 IP addresses, you probably wouldn't ever know. But again, we are getting into areas that will take me longer to type than they're worth as there are so many caveats at the end of the day!!

As for how much money you'll make, £25/month is the right kind of level to expect - certainly don't expect it to be any kind of living.

InsideInsurance

Thermidor wrote: »

Hi,

Thanks for explaining that. So, you get £3 for every thousand visits to your page - even if they don't click on the ad - is that right?

And then you get more if people click on the ad?

Sorry if I seem to be asking the same question over and over - but I'm just trying to get the answer in simple terms (I've decided I'm incredibly thick so do forgive me)

I can understand about the affiliate marketing, and I can see why you'd earn more from that if a slae was made through your site. I suppose that's where the money's to be made?

Tnaks for being so patient!

I get an average of £3 for every 1000 times the advert is shown.

That is because I have 1 advert per page, X% of people click on each advert and the advertisers are paying an average of £Y per click.

Google sum all those up into a simple eCPM figure to save you having to do the calculations each time. Of cause if X or Y changes that then changes the eCPM.

All google ads, to the best of my knowledge, are paid "per click" rather than "per impression".

Not sure about your comment on sale being made through your site? You would assume that as a retailer you would make more profit than as an affiliate but it isnt necessarily the case as certainly some get their sums wrong and some rely on the repeat business to make their actual profit.

breadlinebetty

Thermidor, I will try and explain it for you as easy as I can. Btw, this £25 a month being bandies about, I don't know how everyone is arriving at that figure,but anyway.....................

For ONE Google ad/Adsense that is on your site (forget the clicks for the minute - just talking ONE ad displayed on your site sitting there doing nothing, people see it when they go on to your site, OK?) ONE ad makes you £3 for EVERY 100,000 VISITS by VISITORS. Those VISITS must be unique visitors - in other words - 100,000 DIFFERENT PEOPLE or 100,000 different ISP addresses.

That is if you only have ONE Ad on your website. You can have more than one. Most people do. Some people can have 40 adverts for example. Browse around on websites and you will see banners advertising different things and underneath on the corner of it will be an arrow to click on, when you click on that more ads will come up.

So if you have for example 40 ads on your site, you will get

£3 for every 100,000 visits on EACH ad

Times that by 40 (40 ads) = £120 for every 100,000 visits.

Some webistes have fewer visits, some have many more.

So this £25 figure is not accurate.

On top of the money for just displaying the ad, you also get money for every time someone clicks on an ad. If they look at it for 20 seconds you get (I'll have to check on this) I think it's around 15p a click - but I'm not sure of the exact amount. There are actually people who sit at home all day clciking on adwords for you to up your income, they earn about 5p a click, so you will get more than 5p a click obviously.

I believe you then get income from any sales made by people who have found the company through your site. So if someone clicks on that Adsense Ad on YOUR site and they buy something from that company you get a little bit for that too. It's not much, could be just pennies , 25p maybe? Someone here will probably know that.

The other advertising you're talking is more one to one, you arrange that yourself with the company. They don't pay per click or visit but pay you a percentage for every sale they make through your site and you can make much better money that way bu the amount varies from company to company and what the deal is.

To your first question again, you get £3 for every 100,00 visits PER ad. So if you had 40 ads, you would make £120. If you had 80 ads you would have £240.

paddyrg

Although bear in mind, if you have 80 ads, will the site be worth visiting if you have to crawl past all the ads to get to a blog? It is a balancing act. Too many ads and you put the punters and search engines off, and most advertising companies can detect click-farmers too.

You will not get paid any extra for services bought through someone clicking on an ad UNLESS you have an affiliate deal set up with that company.

breadlinebetty

Adsense ads are usually one liners and a maximum of 4 - you then click on the arrow to see the other ads. They are usually based just at the top of the page, the side or bottom, so no need to disrupt. Lots if websites I visit have it done like that and they're not in your face - you can read the site (blog/forum whatever) with no interference with them. Adsense ads don't keep flashing up like some ads do.

steve1980

breadlinebetty wrote: »

Thermidor, I will try and explain it for you as easy as I can. Btw, this £25 a month being bandies about, I don't know how everyone is arriving at that figure,but anyway.....................

I currently take in £25 per month from my adsense on my forum. That's where the figure comes from. Not sure if you read the entire thread but I have mentioned this previously.