Google Adsense is the number one way for website and blog owners to start monetizing their site. It’s incredibly easy to implement and anyone can start doing it. It’s not just a strategy that newbies like to use, but also one for experienced bloggers and web developers with high traffic sites. Some people are even managing to clear $100,000 per month from Adsense.

But is it really the best option out there for blog monetizing, or are there better alternatives out there for people to be able to extract more profit from their traffic? I’ve heard quite a few blog experts say that the type of people who use Adsense on their blogs are complete newbies who don’t really know too much about how to monetize their site. Although I’m not too sure that this is the 100% truth in my opinion. Let’s go through the facts and opinions of Google Adsense.

The Low Down

Adsense is definitely the most popular and used option for monetizing websites at the moment. You have a good choice of ad sizes available to you, both image and text-based, of which you can place where you see fit on your site. The favorite ad sizes to use are the leader board and the square, as they fit very well in the site header and the sidebar.

When using Adsense you’re paid based on the number of impressions you receive and also for each click you receive. Every day, you’re given an average “RPM”, which is your ‘Revenue per 1000 Impressions’, and a “CPC” which is the average cost per click.

 Advantages of Google Adsense

There are so many advantages to Google Adsense. Why do you think it’s so popular? For starters, it takes only a few minutes to install it on your blog or website. All you have to do is sign up for a free account, then select which ad you want to use. Feel free to customize the look of it, ie. you can choose whether to display only image ads or text ads and change the font color, etc. Then you just need to copy the code and paste it on your site somewhere, as a widget may be or in the header code.

Another good point is that you don’t need a minimum amount of page views per month to be accepted. There are many other advertisers or sponsors that won’t want to pay for ads being on your site unless they’re actually going to get a lot of impressions or clicks on them.

Lastly, the reports that Google gives you are excellent in determining all of your stats. It’s great to be able to tell where your revenue’s coming from, how well you’ve been performing and so on. You can already tell that a company like Google is going to be able to provide so much more advanced report features than other companies offering you monetizing options.

 Disadvantages of Google Adsense

Probably the most talked-about disadvantage for Adsense is the fact that for companies with very high page views and thousands of visitors, it’s like the minimum wage of PPC companies. If you shopped around and tried to get deals with specialized advertisers, you’d definitely be able to get more profit for your traffic. However, this is probably only the case for websites getting around 100,000 visitors a month or more and still leaves Adsense as a great way of earning money from your websites.

 Realistic Revenue Estimates

So what can you expect to make from your site? Well, obviously there’s no perfect way to estimate this, as it will vary depending on your niche, your traffic, where you place the banners and so on. However, I can probably give you an average based on Click-Through Rates and traffic numbers.

In 2014, the average click-through rate is probably around 1%. So let’s say you get 10,000 views a day; you’ll have an average of around 100 people clicking through on the ads. In previous years this would have been a lot higher, but so many people have gotten tired of ads and know what they’re all about now, so the numbers lowered a fair amount recently.

Your CPC will vary widely depending on the niche that you’re specializing in. It will most like normally be between $0.25 and $1.50. Say your average CPC is around $0.60; with an average of 100 clicks a day that would mean you’d earn $60 a day, or $21,900 a year.

 Adsense Alternatives

If you decide that Adsense isn’t quite for you, there are some great alternatives that you can try out.

Infolinks: This is a pay per click program that automatically adds hyperlinks to text on your web pages. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot more of this sort of thing recently in the last year or so. They allow a variety of different payment methods and will work on English, French, German & Spanish websites.

Amazon Associates: Sure, this isn’t a PPC for advertisement, but it is a good alternative and the commission levels are far better. The only downside is that you actually need to get people to buy from Amazon and not just click on the links.

Chitika: This one is probably to most similar to Adsense. You can customize your ads freely, and if you wanted to, split the usage between Chitika and Adsense and it’ll work perfectly. It’s also quite handy as it accepts PayPal as a form of payment.

Adversal: An excellent alternative which is also similar to Chitika. You have all the same banner customization options and so on, and the CTR rate is quite impressive. The only catch with Adversal is that you need a minimum of 50,000 page views per month. So this is probably a good example of where it pays to seek Adsense alternatives when you get a high number of views.

 Conclusion

Adsense is still an excellent way to begin monetizing your site, no matter how many views you’re getting. Although, if you’re getting a substantially high amount of page views, then I do agree with what other bloggers have said that you should seek alternatives. These will be able to give you higher payouts and rewards for your popular website or blog.

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