Google Adsense: clicks don’t make money
After blogging for a while and building up a decent readership, I’ve decided to test out the whole monetization thing. I figured “why not?” – I’ve got nothing to lose, and if I make a few bucks, then I can kind of justify the time I spend (waste?) blogging.
So I’ve decided to give Adsense a serious go here at wpgarage. I read up on it a bit, and took some time to choose certain ad types for certain locations on the page.
So far so good. And I can see that people are clicking.
But here’s where it gets really frustrating: my stats program shows that people are clicking on ads, but these clicks aren’t showing up in the Google Adsense reports. And the few clicks that are showing up in the reports aren’t making any money!
This is annoying, but even worse it strengthens my suspicion that Google can basically do whatever they want and we’d never know. Google could be charging the advertisers for the clicks on their ads without fairly paying me for providing the advertising real estate!
So some questions:
- Does anyone know why Google doesn’t pay out for clicks? I read somewhere that it’s because they deem such clicks as problematic or fraudulent. If so, what is this based on?
- Is there any type of checks and balances system where we can verify that if Adwords advertisers are being charged for clicks, Adsense users are being fairly compensated?
- There are so many monetization systems out there – any suggestions for other systems besides Adsense?
I can see this monetization thing is not going to be so easy…
Category: Monetization
I clicked one of your google adwords links, “adsense-sucks”. Ironically it sucked just like the title. It was just a page of more google ads!?
I suspect a site like this will be very difficult to monetise though as most of your visitors will be tech savvy web nerds who aren’t prone to go clicking adsense links willy nilly – unless they feel like being nice to you.
Ironic, huh? I know, I’m from the “I think Google Ads are ugly as sin” camp, and yet I’m using it on this site now! So much for principles.
But the truth is, this site is a test for me to see how Adsense and monetization works. I agree with you about the nerdy types not clicking – I know that I never click on Adsense!
And that’s fine – nobody has to click, and if I don’t make any money I’ll remove the ugliness. But the fact is that people are clicking (maybe they need some lessons in Nerdiness 101) and I’m not getting paid! Why? And why is the sky blue? Why do we have spleens? And why am I getting visitors from StumbleUpon? (You see, it’s all part of my quest for meaning.)
Is it possible that spam bots, other search engines etc. are trawling your site and clicking the ads? If that’s the case then Google can probably recognise that and ignore them. Just a thought …
Adsense ads are iframed JavaScript – and bots are not able to execute JS…
I have the same problem…my stats program (MyBlogLog) and AdSense didn’t match. Over time it has gotten worse. I suspect Google is cracking down on what they think are “invalid” clicks. I believe a number of other AdSense users out there are experiencing the same scenario. I have read that users that who contact Google regarding the discrepancy are basically told there is nothing they can do and must live with it. While I haven’t verified it, I have also read that the stats scripts might be causing the discrepancy as well…but I haven’t had time to test this theory though.
Chris – it’s kind of comforting to see that others are experiencing the same thing. The problem is that we have no idea what makes a click invalid, and only Google knows who clicks and why they are ok or not.
If this is the case, I’m wondering how anyone actually makes any money from Google Adsense. I’m going to test out Adsense for a bit, but if I don’t see any revenue from it I’m just going to remove it and try to form a new monetization strategy.
Miriam – There are plenty of publishers out there that make money from AdSense but it all comes down to traffic and audience. Numbers is what wins it in the end when it comes to AdSense. I believe that by diversifying your income sources you should be able to maximize your profits (at least from what I have been reading).
Chris – Well, we’ll see how it works out over here. Yesterday I actually made some money off of clicks! So the experiment continues.
Your link about “diversifying” was to a page about the SEO All in One plugin. Is that were you meant to link to?
Oops, meant to links here: http://dereksemmler.com/2007/08/01/blogging-for-money-july-2007/
It’s a breakdown on this guy’s sources of income…it’s not much but shows that it pays to diversify.
Congrats on the clicks…I think you will notice they will increase as time goes on and your readership grows!
Great site here by the way…I love WordPress.
Chris – Thanks! Positive feedback means a lot to bloggers, as you yourself probably know, since it’s like we’re writing to the darkness, and you wonder who’s reading and if they really care. So I’m so glad you like the site.
The idea of diversifying income sources is really interesting. I’m going to test it out here as soon as I find some time.
If you’re talking about clicks on your links unit up in the header of the site, you need to read up on how they work a bit more.
Basically, Google’s link units don’t pay for clicks. They only pay if a user clicks on a Google ad that shows up on the subsequent page after they click on the link unit.
Hey Mysterious Matt – I’ve got a ton to learn about how Adsense works. I had heard that Google doesn’t actually pay for clicks on those links, but I could see that people were clicking on actual ads, and not that link unit (or whatever you want to call it) based on the size of the ad.
If you or anyone else has any advice on where to learn more about Adsense, I’d appreciate it. Google’s Adsense help isn’t so helpful, as far as I can see.
On one of my websites that have about 3.3 million pages, I receive about 100 actual adsense clicks per day as fact (no bots or click fraud). But, out of 14,000 impressions and 100 clicks, I have received $0 in payments. This is no good. I know as a fact that these are genuine. I had a few friends click an ad they saw that was not a psa from their own houses to simulate actual click throughs. Nothing. I checked back a few days later in Adsense and still nothing from them. This is genuine fraud by Google and this leads me to suspect why their reported profit margins have sky rocketed recently. I do not know as fact, but I suspect they are conducting mass fraud by not paying for the real estate they so desperately require.
I have so far received payment for all clicks on a site of mine which has adsense on it.
I doubt Google is committing ‘fraud’ per se. They’re just getting over zealous with preventing fraud by their customers and you’ve been on the wrong end of the stick unfortunately.
Nope, they’re real. I’ve never even clicked on one myself. Average daily page views of the site are 11,000-16,000. Average unique daily users of 500-700. Average clicks of about 100 daily. Adsense type is Leaderboard 728X90.
The browsers of the site aren’t just passing through. They are shopping for something or discussing a topic. Usually when discussing a topic, adsense has only been good about providing relevant ad content to that topic.
The 8,000,000,000 pound gorilla always wins when pushing around the litle guy.
They may not hose everyone, but when you nickle and dime on a mass scale, profit margins go through the roof quickly.
I know this is an old post, but I wanted to add the following.
If your site is getting enough traffic, adsense is the worst choice. You could outright sell that space for $$$$ monthly / cpm rather than give it away to Google. I have written them numerous time sabout their aribrarily devaluing my ad clicks and i make nothing. while their adwords advertisers still have to pay. I also caught them in the act of charging me for 35% more clicks then they actually delivered, yet they arrogantly insist they are right and I’m an idiot. Screw google. They are not king anymore. I get more traffic from inbound links than Google anyway
Ahh,
The great google discussion. How about this food for thought, sorry if someone else touched on this, but I must speak my mind.
First of all, they do charge the people who’s ads are being clicked on no matter what. They have checks and balances that give a little back, but it’s still not correct. I have posted many ads via google and the results have been less than satisfactory to say the least.
I kept a very close eye on the amount of clicks I was charged, and the amount of visitors actually registered on my web stats via cPanel(backend admin panel for website). They don’t care about any of that. Called, emailed, chatted online… nothing but pay your bill, too bad. Trying to say that the webhost stats are not correct. What do you do.
Thought I would shed a little light on the flip side of the wonderful AdSense/AdWords debacle we all find ourselves in.
I am seeing the same thing at my site. I have around 15000 page views per day and each page displaying 3 Adsense ads but on Google Adsense report they show somewhere around 3000 page impressions for all the ads. This does not make sense to me. The number of Adsense ads that I display daily are atleast 45000 and not 3000 as shown by google. I hope this issue is being worked on by Google.
my stats from awstats and webalizer have consistently shown over 5 times more traffic than google gives me credit for. this has been for a couple years.
Make sure your Adsense does display paid ads.
If no ads are found by Google for your site, then they put in PLA (Public Service Announcements), which don’t cash in…
And indeed, this site would be hard to monetize through Adsense, as we’re all tech savvy users here
Try some affiliate marketing and bring value to your users by offering niche-related ads in your sidebar. Like for example, there are many webdevs out there that sometimes look for a quick WP solution, and they turn to templates
I wouldn’t worry that Google keeps the money for itself
The rule of thumb is $1 per 1000 pageviews. If you get less you need to fix something. Adsense has a detailed list of hot locations of ads. This also changes with time. Also some ad types are more effective.
Great on the paying clicks from adsense. I’m too trying for another monetization service.
I had an Adsense account back in 2008, It was banned on account of invalid activity. They didn’t provided any more information on it. Since then I have succeeded to keep myself away from this program.
And regarding your suggestion for other system, I personally love buysellads.