I get asked this questions a lot: how much does Google Adsense pay? While I cannot discuss my specific earnings due to Adsense’s terms of service (TOS), the answer to this question is quite complex (I’ll simplify it later), but to sum it up, the payment varies; you could earn $0.01 per click or you could earn over $20 per click. To make this easier to understand, I’m going to start with how much Adsense’s pays at the minimum.
How Much Does Google Adsense Pay: A Quick Explanation
Adsense’s Payment Threshold
Google Adsense’s payment threshold is $100, meaning you have to make at least $100 by the end of the payment period (this is usually around the 20th to the 26th each month), otherwise Adsense will hold on to that money until you reach that $100 threshold. You’ll see this money under a report that goes over your finalised earnings, which are earnings that were double-checked to make sure they were genuine clicks from your visitors and not bot or spam traffic.
Factors Affecting How Much You Make
In addition to what I wrote above, the following factors affect how much you make:
- Your niche; some niches don’t pay well.x
- The Adwords competition level for the keywords you’re targeting.x
- The suggested bid (you’ll often see “Adsense” keywords with $1.00+ cost per click, or CPC for short).
- How much traffic you receive.
- How many page views you receive.
- Your Click-through rate, also known as CTR.
- The 32% Google receives per click.
Example:
To help you understand how these work together, I’m going to use a fictitious website as an example:
Let’s say you have a website in an evergreen niche that clearly has PPC advertisers bidding on keywords. For the sake of this example, we’ll say that every suggested bid is $1.00. You have 100 pages on your site that receive 100 unique visitors a day each (who don’t use Adblock) with every visitor viewing 1 page. Your CTR is 1% in this example, so this means you make $100/day.
But wait! Google needs to take 32% of your earnings, so you actually make $68 a day. However, this example doesn’t account for clicks that Adsense deems as “accidental” or “invalid”, so you’ll actually be making a bit less.
Later on, I may come back to this article and create an “Adsense estimate” forumla, but dor more information on how these all work together, I highly recommend reading the Adsense article on Minterest for a more in-depth analysis and example.