Google Adsense provides a solid and well-established way for small web publishers to monetize the content they make freely available to the world. Many factors contribute to how much revenue a website can generate. These include content category (e.g., education, finance, entertainment, health, travel, etc.), geographical location of the audience, advertiser demand, number of page views, etc. After a few years of experience with Google Adsense, we think that traffic and RPM are the two most important factors that determine the revenue generated by a website.

1. Traffic (i.e., number of page views). There is nothing more important than attracting lots of visitors to your website, who are enticed to actively engage with your content. Traffic is not built overnight. It takes a lot of hard work, adding one quality page at a time. There is no substitute for content that provides useful knowledge and value to your visitors. Let your passion for your content drive you to keep adding high-quality content and traffic will follow. Note that the number of page views you count based on your own tracking method will often be higher than the number of page views registered by Adsense. In our experience, page views recorded by Adsense are 70% to 90% of the counts recorded by us.

2. RPM. RPM, or revenue per mille, is the revenue generated per 1,000 page impressions. Your content category (e.g., education, finance, entertainment, health, news, science, sports, travel, etc.) will, to a large part, determine the RPM of your web pages, and there is no denying that certain categories generate more revenue than others (see Google Adsense). While this is important, we suspect most people start a website driven by their passion for a particular topic rather than by a desire to simply generate revenue. Therefore, your content category is what it is. Pay close attention to the recommendations provided by Google Adsense to tweak all of the relevant parameters that will maximize the RPM for your web pages. We also have a hunch that RPM grows with increasing traffic, although the exact mathematical relationship between the two is not entirely clear to us. Our monthly RPM varies greatly with seasons and ranges from $2 to $3. Our daily RPM fluctuates more.

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