AdSense payout discrepancies

I started using AdSense last month. I am happy with it overall, but do not understand how the payout works. One day, I get 26 clicks and make 55 cents. Yesterday I get 12 clicks and make $13.00. I do not understand that at all. It is always so inconistent? I know you get paid per click, but can it really be that clickling on some ads bring in that much more money than clicking on another ad?Thanks.

Dominic Carone, Ph.D.
Founder and Webmaster of MedFriendly.com

If you had 26 clicks and made 55 cents, then probably you had some invalid clicks. It can be inconsistent, but the less traffic you have the more inconsistent it is.

What is an invalid click?

I doubt it has anything to do with invalid clicks. The ad payouts are based on adwords bid amounts which vary greatly depending on the content of the page you are targeting. There are some terms out there that have several dollars per click payput while others have only a few cents per click.

You have Adsense on many pages on your site. The ads are different on each page depending on that page's content. Some pages will have better $/click than others depending on the content. It also depends on advertiser's beginning and ending diffrent campaigns. I have 3,000 visitors/day and my Adsense $ still bounces around day-to-day - it's the moving-average trends that I am more concerned with.

the daily payout will make more sense if you have 500 or 1,000 clicks a day. some of clicks could be PSA which doesn't pay at all.