Don't Go Too Extreme When Choosing Keyword For Google Adsense

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) of keyword for Google Adsense is a hot topic in all webmaster or advertising forums. Some guys blame their low PPC keywords for their humble return. Some guys tend to ask what are the keywords which the highest PPC and plan to build up independent websites or write blogs around them. There are still some guys trying to make money by providing an updated list of keywords sorted from high PPC to low PPC. Needless to say, no one who hopes to make money purely through Google Adsense will be so stupid to choose the keywords with the lowest PPC. However, should the webmasters follow the strategy of targeting the keywords with highest PPC in order to maximize their return?  Not really.

To facilitate your understanding, let’s go through the mechanism of making money from Google AdSense briefly. If a visitor comes to your site and clicks an ad, you and Google will share the revenue from each click, which equals to the Pay-Per-Click price set by some advertiser. Based on this logic, the determinants of your Google AdSense earnings including the followings:

• The traffic of the website. More accurately, the number of unique Visitors of your site. Let’s designate it as N.

• The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of your ads. 

• The average PPC of the keywords determined by your website content.

So, the total revenue R equals N*CTR*PPC. Obviously, PPC is not the sole factor that determines your return from Google Adsense. You have to maintain a relative high standard of quality of your website and implement effective and continuing promotion strategy, so as to ensure a good deal of traffic. Meanwhile, in order to achieve a satisfactory CTR, you have to make effective use of ad places in your websites and in the meantime not overuse your website’s ad capacity so as not to scare your visitors away. Content quality and relativity are quite important for CTR, too. Thus, although centering your topic or content around keywords with high PPC is quite important, you have to achieve a satisfactory result of your website traffic and CTR as well.

However, a high PPC never means a highest PPC. If you automatically believe a highest PPC will secure a highest return from Google Adsense, normally you are wrong. Based on my own Adsense data, the keywords which bring me the most return accumulatively are those ones who have middle to upper level of PPC, but far from the highest. Because the web pages related to middle to upper level of PPC are, in a statistical sense, always have a much higher amount of traffic and a much higher CTR than those web pages with the keywords whose PPCs are among the highest,  and the traffic and CTR advantages together far outweigh the disadvantage out of a relative low PPC. Of course, this conclusion is purely based on my experience. If your experience is totally different from mine, don’t hesitate to leave your arguments here in the comment section.

Anyway, I suggest you not go too extreme when choosing keyword for your Google Adsense program. My experience tells me that targeting at the keywords with a middle to upper PPC will bring you a much larger return. Why not take a shot?