How Much Does Google Adsense Pay?

I find that newbies are always wanting to know how much Google Adsense is going to pay before they put it on their sites. As much as I wish it were a simple question to answer, it really isn’t.

So how much does Adsense pay it’s publishers?

Adsense pays on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, so publishers get paid based on how many clicks they get to their ads. The pay for each click can be as low as pennies and as high as $10 (in very rare cases). From the variety of blogs I have had I would say expecting to be paid 15-50 cents per click is a decent average.
Certain niches will find that they rarely get more than 15 cents a click and other niches may rarely get less than 50 cents per click.
The price is determined by a few factors, but the biggest is the demand from advertisers to advertise for a certain keyword phrase. So, say you write an article called “Gardening tools for beginners”, advertisers who sell gardening tools will essentially be competing to advertise next to your article. If there is a lot of demand from them, then they will have to pay more to advertise next to your article. When they pay more, you will in turn earn more from each click.

Warning: Do NOT click your own ads under any circumstances!

The whole Adsense system is based is dependent on the hope that advertisers are not getting false clicks and as a result they are quick to close the account of anyone who they SUSPECT is generating false clicks. Don’t encourage readers to click them, don’t tell your friends and family to click them, and definitely don’t click them yourself. For as much money as Google makes you can rest assured that they have spent millions of dollars on tools to detect false clicks and they are very good at finding the culprits.

So how do you find Keywords that make more money?

The easiest way to do this is to use the Google Adwords tool. When you get there go ahead and enter a keyword and hit enter. After the results show, click the columns button on the right hand side as shown below.

After you click this, select “Estimated Avg. CPC”. Now you will see your list of keywords and their average CPC that the ADVERTISER will have to pay. I would go ahead and click the Estimated Avg CPC column to sort it from high-to-low like shown below.

Best Practices

I would suggest using these figures as a gauge to which topics and/or niches might have better paying Adsense ads, rather than making assumptions about what you will earn. There are a lot of variables at play and it will be impossible to make accurate predictions on what you will earn.