Google Adsense - Which Keywords to Target?

A common mistake I see among Adsense publishers, and frankly, a mistake I’ve been doing for long time, is hunting the highest paying keywords within the niche.

This strategy can be very powerful if you display only one ad block.
On your single ad block you’ll probably have no more then 3-4 ads, which mean the top 3-4 paying ads will be displayed. In certain niches the top 3-4 ads might reach 3-4 dollars pet click!

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However, most publishers use all 3 ad blocks, to improve CTR. This way, your site might display up to 12 ads.
To maximize revenue, you should maximize the average CPC, and not the maximum CPC.

For instance, let’s take the keyword “Guitar Heroes”.
Let’s go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Write “Guitar Heroes”(without the comments) in the Keywords box, select “Cost and Ad Position Estimates”, and set 100$ as Max CPC.

For the Keyword “Guitar Heroes” google shows us an amazing CPC of more then 10 bucks for the first position!

However, let us reduce Max CPC to 0.70$, and let’s search for guitar heroes in the list. At the time of writing this article, the keyword “Guitar Heroes” showed average CPC of 0.37$, and ad position 1-3.

What this information tells us, is that there’s a single Adwords advertiser who bids a crazy amount of more then 10 bucks for this keyword, but he’s alone. The next highest bidder is bidding less then 40 cents, and you know what it means for your ads? Most clicks you’ll generate will not give you more then a few cents.

Now let’s take a look at another example.
Let’s take the keyword “free spyware blockers”.
At 100$ CPC it gives you $5.36 average CPC - not bad at all, but not half as good as the 10 bucks for “Guitar Heroes”.
Now let’s go down to 1.70$ in the max CPC. You can see that at this max CPC the Estimated Ad position is 4-6. This means that you’ll have at least 3 ads that pay more then 1.70 per click.
Now go down to 1 dollar. The Estimated Ad Position is already 7-10. That’s What we’ve been hunting for! This means that at least 6 of your ads are paying more then a whole dollar!
That’s already a good keyword.

But that’s not the best you can do. What we want to find now, is a keyword that gets Estimated Ad Position 11-15 for 1 dollar. In other words, we want to find a keyword that costs more then one dollar on any(or nearly any) click. Beware, this is going to be hard, since such keywords are extremely rare.

I’ve succeeded finding only a single keyword that yields such great results while writing this article, and it was “affiliate internet make money online program”. This keyword yields 4.53$ if you set max bid to 100, but you will get at least one dollar for each and every click, so it won’t be a bummer any way.

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