How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make $100,000 With Google AdSense

Is it really possible to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense (or by selling ads on your website/blog)? If so, then the real question is how much traffic do you really need to make big bucks with Google AdSense? While it’s true that we can’t predict the Google AdSense income exactly, we can optimize the ads in different ways so as to make the most out of it.

Also, you must make sure that your website category is advertising friendly because your AdSense income depends a lot upon the category of your website. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to find out the competition in your industry. If there is enough competition (i.e. if the suggested bid by AdWords for keywords in your niche is high) then we can assume that Google will fill your ad spaces with high paying ads (see how AdSense works).

For example, if you Google search “loans” then you’ll see a lot of ads so it means that if you have a blog related to personal finance then there will be enough competition for your ad space. Now I've randomly added few keywords to Keyword Planner to find out its suggested bid by AdWords. Here they are:

As you can see, the competition for keywords related to “finance” is very high compared to keywords related to “food”. Of course, the suggested bid is just an estimate and the real cost-per-click varies a lot. But still, even if it’s $5 then it means a lot. Why? It’s because the cost per click to advertise on Google is very high compared to cost per click on Google Display Network. So if an advertiser is paying $0.50/click on Google then he may be paying only $0.10/click on Google Display Network.

How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make Money With AdSense?

Let’s say you want to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense and/or Google AdSense alternatives.

$100,000 divided by 365 = $274 a day.

So, you have to create either: 274 pages that earn $1 a day OR 548 pages that earn 50 cents a day OR 1,096 pages that earn 25 cents a day (which sounds reasonable, right?). Let’s say you have 1,096 high quality blog posts and you earn $0.25 per click from AdSense.

I have analyzed the traffic and AdSense stats (using Google Image Search) of several websites including my own blogs and websites.

From my analysis, I found that the average Page CTRis around 1% (or it’s something that we can achieve easily). But it really depends upon your niche, web site design and other factors.

In fact I have achieved a Page CTR of over 20% in 2007 for a niche website and was making $100+ a day from Google AdSense alone.

Let’s Do The Math To Make $100,000 A Year With Google AdSense

Let’s assume that you have a Page CTR of 1% and your average CPC is $0.25 (I believe it’s quite an achievable target unless your keywords have no advertiser competition – e.g. a recipe blog).

Some of the top paying AdSense niches are Finance, Internet Marketing, Technology, Web Hosting, Internet & Computers, Software, Health etc. and some of the lowest paying AdSense niches are Entertainment, Arts, Movies, Celebrity Gossips, News blog, Jokes, Wallpapers, Quotes, Recipes, Photo blogs etc.

As mentioned earlier $100,000 a year means you have to earn $274 a day. If your average CPC is $0.25 then you need 100,000/0.25 = 400,000 clicks a year (or approximately 1,000 clicks a day) to earn $100,000 a year from Google AdSense. Assuming that your Page CTR is 1% you need approximately 100,000 page views a day. Now, let’s say your “Bounce Rate” (it is the estimated percentage of visits to your website that consist of a single page view) is 100%. It means that you need 100,000 unique visitors a day itself to generate 100,000 page views a day.

In a nutshell, you need 100,000 visitors a day to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense alone (with a CTR of 1% and CPC of $0.25).

But you are not using AdSense alone to monetize your website, right? You can make more money by selling direct banner ads, in-text ads, CPM ads, sponsored links, affiliate marketing, etc.

Finally, you can tweak the AdSense click-through-rate by using an AdSense friendly template for your website/blog. But make sure that your website is not ad heavy as it will impact the user experience in a negative way. And as always, you can focus on creating awesome content and driving more traffic so that it increases your Google AdSense earnings (and your advertising revenues) naturally.

Happy Monetizing!