AP 0771: What Is a Good Earnings Per Click Number for Online Ads?

AskPat 771 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? This is Pat Flynn and welcome to Episode 771 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

Now here is today's question from Sarah.

Sarah: Hi Pat, my name is Sarah with Pro Baseball Insider. I know that you started off making money through your affiliates and I was wondering what is a good earnings per click? Is $10 per click good or is 10 cents per click good? I have no idea. I was wondering what your range is? When is it just not worth your time? Thank you so much for all that you do. Your transparency is really helpful and I just appreciate, you've been such a big help over the years. Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Hey Sarah, thank you so much for the question and all the support throughout the years. I really appreciate you. This question, there's many aspects to it because earnings per click can differ depending on how you use it. There's things like AdSense, which you can put on your website, which then auto generates an ad based on different keywords that people bid for and different companies and sort of like a bidding process. You can get anywhere between 10 cents to 10 dollars and even more than that per click on your website if you serve those ads. Now typically you're going to see things in the dollar to under dollar range but it depends on the niche that you're in, it depends on the keywords that people are bidding for and sites that they want to show their ads on and what not and the companies obviously that are doing that.

But just to give you an example, on one of my niche sites, SecurityGuardTraininghq.com, the average earnings per click is about $1.25. Which doesn't seem like much, but when you think about it, if you just get 10 clicks you're going to already have more than $12 at that point, which is really cool. That's earnings per click if you are serving AdSense as or ads that you can get paid per click. Now you can consider earnings per click in a different way by extrapolating the number of people who convert versus the number of people who actually click on something. This could be done with advertisements for example, say you're running an advertisement on Facebook and depending on how many people click versus how many people convert you can get and calculate the earnings per click. It can also be done on your website, on different actions, how many people click on the button versus how many people actually end up paying for the thing.

You can start to analyze and see how much a lead might cost and every single click that happens on a button, which is really interesting. But I'm leaning toward thinking that you were meaning putting some ads on your website and seeing how much money you can get per click on your website. But if that's not the case, then it could be the other way, which is more earnings per click on certain ads that you're putting up. Whether they’re ads for your own stuff or ads for other people’s stuff. You can calculate how much you might earn based on how many clicks you have and the conversion rates. Then you can start to extrapolate, okay well if I put this much more money into it, it should grow that much more. If you get 5% conversion rate then you know that if you put twice as much money you're going to get a 5% conversion rate but make much more money on top of that. That's what paid advertising does.

I'm going to be talking more about paid advertising later this year on SmartPassiveIncome.com because that's something that I'm starting to dive into as well. I'm using tips from people like Rick Mulready from the Art of Paid Traffic and Amy Porterfield from AmyPorterfield.com. It's going to be really cool. But when it comes to the original question and where my head went first, was on something like AdSense and you can earn anywhere between 10 cents and 10 dollars depending on the keywords that you use. You might want to look at the Google keyword tool and Google AdWords to start to determine the cost per click and how much people are bidding for those certain keywords using AdWords. That's another way to go about it.

A site that may actually be a little useful to you as well if that's something you're interested in before you start creating a website or even serving ads on your website. You can put in keywords related to your niche into a tool called SEMrush and then there are some tools on the left hand side that you can see in terms of the competition for the keyword and how many people are paying for different keywords and what that might cost them. You get a percentage of that per click, if you are going to serve AdSense ads in that way.

Now this just came to mind, you could do and I've heard a few people doing this a long time ago. I haven't heard that much of this lately. But you could serve private advertising on your website. You could connect with a company yourself without having to go through Google, which is beneficial because then you would skip the middle man. You get to have a little bit more money of the top there. But what's nice about Google is they do most of the legwork for you, they find them and they have them do bidding against each other. It's all kind of automated. But you could set up a deal with a private advertiser company that you maybe work with, who doesn't want to affiliate marketing but they'd rather serve a banner ad on your website for example, or a link in a post or something. Instead of paying a flat fee, you can potentially have a deal where they pay you a certain amount per click because they just want those leads coming in. That's another way to go about it.

Anyways, Sarah, there's a lot of ways to go about this but hopefully that's helpful and gives you some thoughts on what you could possibly do. Thank you so much for the question. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to askpat.com and you can ask right there.

Now to finish off here is a quote from Euripides and he said: “A man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.” Euripides is awesome and it's an awesome name and I think I mispronounced it earlier. But don't email me about that because I think I corrected it. But maybe both times were wrong. I don't know, anyway it's just a start to the new year. I just came back from Australia. I'm jet lagged and apparently have to sneeze. Thank you for the “God bless you” and take care, I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.