Adsense + Traffic = ?

I'm just wondering how hard it is to make money with adsense.
Are there some people around who do make some money this way, and if so, do any of you want to share the amounts you make, maybe with some type of traffic comparison.

I guess what I'm getting at is if you have a narrowly focused website that doesn't sell anything, I imagine it would be well suited to using adsense, but what kind of traffic do you need to be getting to make a buck?

First off, this is an adwords forum not adsense.

Second, you do not need large amounts of traffic if the traffic you do get is inclined to purchase things.

However, that being said most traffic is not looking to purchase something in most cases, especially traffic to non-commercial sites.

The content of the site you run will help google choose which ads to show, so the best option may be to give it a test and see how it goes for your particular niche. If it doesn't make enough money, switch to something else, maybe something more specifically targeted to your audience by doing an affiliate program.

The description actually says this forum is for Adwords AND Adsense, but anyway...

I hear what you're saying about targeted traffic, but It's still hard to get any kind of idea of the kind of revenue you might expect. Say I had a site getting 500 visitors a day with a very narrow focus, ie. targeted traffic, could I expect 1% of people to click an ad?

And then what percent of the PPC cost to the advertiser does Google give to me?

I'm really looking for some feedback from people who have run a successful campaign - I want figures goddamit!

Figures from an un-related topic are useless to you.

For example, mortgage PPC clicks are worth dollars at time. While others are worth $0.05, it completely depends on your unique content.

you're very busy today bob, but your not giving me much.
does anyone have something useful to say on this subject?

You seem to be missing my point.

If someone gives you a number, the first thing you should do is ignore it. Why? Because it's useless in making a decision on your own site.

This would be like making a decision on what colour is most popular for cars based on popular colours for a house.

If you base your decisions on examples from unrelated topics, you will make poor decisions.

As I stated earlier, the best idea is to try it and see how it works for you.

Numbers?
Some people make thousands of dollars per day with tens of thousands of visitors. Some people make $1 per day having hundreds, some people make $1 per day having tens.

Does that help?

Yeah, OK fair enough. I get your point.
Basically it's impossible to know without doing it. Right?
But just say I did a bit of research and found that click costs for my niche were in the ballpark of $2.00 can I expect 1%, 10% or 50% of this for each click my visitors make?
With some idea you could make a conservative estimate based on, say, 1% click rate of total traffic.
People must have some idea of the revenue they stand to collect before building a site, loading it with content, optimising it etc. etc.
Who in their right mind would jump into a business in which they had no idea of what, if anything, they stood to make.
There must be some way of creating a feasibility study and business plan for this type of business.
I guess just traffic estimates, click through estimates and percentage estimates would do it.

Yep... cause what one gets is not what you may expect.

First, G doesn't say how much % they give you... so 2$ for a click means nothing, since G may keep 95% of the money, and you never know what people clicked anyway. You may expect around a 5% click rate, but again, if you placement is not good, you may get .1%

Nope... I have no idea how much and how good... if you make a site for the future money, then it will not be as good as if you make it cause you like the subject. I make a site cause I simply decided to make a site and rake in the serps for it... no matter how lucrative or lame it can be.

Well, in order to make a perceptible income out of this, you are going to have a lot of ranking pages. Having 200 pages, but only 3 that ranks ain't gonna be the wealth, specially if it's the low value pages that get the traffic.

Take something like 5% for click rate, on 500 views, you get 25 clicks... so it all comes to the value of the clicks at that point. But if you have 20k views/day... then the numbers look much better, even with low value clicks.

You have to give it a try and see. From one industry to an other the difference is huge. Entertainment will give you cents, when technical and high value things like car stuff may give you a dollar... gotta try to see.

A really helpful post jocelyn, thanks.
I'm really into the site i'm getting up and have great faith that there's a big audience for it so, it'll be a labor of love too.

Since it a type of comparison site, there should be possibility for paid banner ads too - more quantifiable.

Thanks again.

The best earning AdSense pages are labours of love and not labours for money, so at least you have that going for you.

There is a large drop in many of the clients i have seen in the adsense earning. No one know's the fact till date/..

Adsense earnings depends entirely on the quantity of your campaigns. When you say that it will be based on your high paying niche keywords, it may not be advisable to do because everyone will be more that willing to plunge on those keywords.

Google doesn't reveal the percentage of what they will give to the publishers of these ads until now its still a mystery.

There are people earning from $100 - $200 a day from adsense alone. Lots of them don't want to share what they do but some said that it is based on quantity.

Maybe having sites that have low paying keywords but got thousands of pages or a few pages that got high ranking-high paying keywords.

Hope that helps.