New to advertising

November 30, 2008 8:05 PM

I have a website with about 2000 hits a day. I have recently and grudgingly plastered it with google ads. Can anyone tell me, ideally if traffic keeps up, what kind of revenue might this generate per day. Any personal experience would be great. Thanks.
posted by Benzle to grab bag (8 comments total)

[link to your site removed - put it in your profile, not here, thanks]
posted by jessamyn at 8:43 PM on November 30, 2008

It depends a lot on how topical the ads are and whether or not the people that read your website are looking for the sort of things that get advertised. But at 2000 hits a day, I'd say "pennies". Some topics have very expensive cost per click but I don't think your site will. (I saw the URL before jessamyn removed it. Go put it in your profile.)

I had a very relevant combination of web forums and Google ads (forum about Irish music and instruments, ads selling instruments and CDs etc.) which was getting somewhere in the range of 60k page views (ie, actual pages, not counting hits for images and CSS files and so on), and that was pulling in a couple bucks a day. I've handed management of the forum and advertising over to someone else now, but it paid for its own hosting and my time.

By the way, it won't help you at all that all of your content is above the fold and your ads are below the fold. People don't need to scroll down to see your main content, so get the ads up where people can see them.
posted by mendel at 9:38 PM on November 30, 2008

Results can vary, depending on the type of site (are people coming for information, for entertainment, or to research a purchase?), whether your visitors are regulars or newcomers, the placement and format of your ads, how well your ads are targeted to your content, the depth of the pool of ads for your niche, etc.

Google doesn't like their publishers throwing around exact numbers, but if I had the kind of traffic Mendel writes about (all else being equal), my yearly take would be in the large five figures. But I'm happy just to have my hosting costs and DSL paid for by Google.
posted by Knappster at 10:04 PM on November 30, 2008

If by hits, you mean actuall page views, then the answer is: it depends.

How many ads per page, how are they integrated with your content. What is the nature of your content? How much of your traffic is driven by search engines?

A kind of run of the mill site might get $0.75-$2 eCPMs (effective cost per thousand impressions). Each ad placementon the page counts as an impression. If your pages have three ads per page, you probably won't get 3x the revenue you would get from a single ad, but you might get 2x, or $1.50-$4.00 per thousand page views. So, you could see $3-$8/day if your 2000 hits are 2000 page views.

You could also see a lot less if most of your users are regulars and so ad blind. Or you may have a content niche that doesn't hAve much value to advertisers. Or maybe your ad integration sucks.

Conversely, you might do 2-4x better than my estimates. You might have a desirable niche. Or maybe you could easilyboost things with better ad integration, or you could double your traffic from search engines with some basic, white hat, SEO
posted by Good Brain at 11:44 PM on November 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

You should see the results in your Google control panel within 24 hours to give you a guide. Unless you've got a lot of layouts your playing with or your traffic is periodic those numbers will be pretty stable.

But based on my experience I would say: Per month you'll get enough to cover hosting costs and a meal.
posted by Ookseer at 12:15 AM on December 1, 2008

When I had google ads on a run-of-the-mill eclectic link blog, doing 1000 hits on an average day I cleared $100 over about 6 months. The PageRank was 6 at that time.

I think it matters what your PageRank is, because in part that determines what % of your visitors are there after a random search for something else, and therefore might click an ad.
posted by roofus at 2:10 AM on December 1, 2008

Not quite on-topic, but you want to use more descriptive words in your tags.
posted by dunkadunc at 4:48 AM on December 1, 2008

Assume you're going to see a lot less than what's quoted. I don't know anyone who's made as much as they thought they were going to make from AdSense.

Tell your users it's an experiment. See how it does after a month. Then decide.

You might do better with some other ad model than AdSense.
posted by micawber at 2:00 PM on December 1, 2008