AdSense is probably the most popular pay per click (PPC) program for publishers. Google, the company behind AdSense, always displays relevant ads regardless of the content on the page. This is very important because irrelevant ads will attract fewer visitors. The cost per click (CPC) depends on the market niche. It can be only one cent but you can also get few dollars for a single click. Since the average cost for each keyword or search phrase is publicly known, many internet marketers are trying to optimize their websites for those high paying keywords. Many such attempts fail and they blame Google for it. The truth is that the failure could be predicted. If you want to succeed in internet marketing including AdSense you should understand that you need traffic.
Traffic means visitors coming to your site. When they visit your site they will search for interesting content. If they will find AdSense ads interesting they will click on them and you will be paid for it. The best and the cheapest source of visitors is traffic from web search engines, especially Google. To get search engine traffic your website needs to be present on the first page of search results. The top position gets approximately 42% of clicks. For lower positions this number is significantly reduced. Therefore, you should target keywords that have high search volume and low competition. The so called “high paying keywords” have huge competition and you will never get high ranking and consequently required traffic.
The second reason to avoid targeting keywords with high CPC is the source of AdSense ads. Those ads do not come automatically–there are some AdWords advertisers that manage advertising campaigns. AdWords advertisers can choose where their ads will appear. The first choice is search result pages. Whenever somebody searches for target keywords their ads will be displayed next to search results. This is high quality traffic because those who search for specific keyword are actually looking for something. The second option for AdWords advertisers is user content or web pages with AdSense ads. The truth is that very few advertisers in highly competitive markets, where each click costs 10$ or more, use this option. Even if they do choose advertising on content pages, they carefully select websites where their ads will be displayed. The reason is simple. If you pay a lot for advertising you make sure this investment will return. Of course, this doesn’t mean that no high cost per click ads appear on websites as AdSense, it only means that there are less chances to get those ads with high CPC.