Click-through rate is defined as the percentage of clicks per impression of an ad. This means that, in average, people will click twice on AdSense ads for every 100 impressions. My opinion is that Google’s announcement is not really accurate and that average CTR is somewhere around 1%. But for the purpose of this post, I will stick to the official Google answer to CTR.
Now that we know how many clicks to expect from users, lets suppose that every ad click will bring in 25 cents. Let’s also suppose that the website owner needs $3K per month for a living. This means that the website needs 12k ad clicks per month for the owner to pay his bills. Since data shows that CPM is lower on social media, it isn’t wrong to say that new visitors will have higher CTR than returning visitors as the chance for the former to accidentally click on ads is higher. Let’s take the 20-80 rule and suppose that new visitors will represent 80% of ad clicks. In other words, new visitors will generate 9600 clicks that represents 480k ad impressions at 2% CTR. Finally, if we suppose that new visitors view 1.5 pages per visit, 320k new visitors are needed for the website every month.
New visitors will most likely come from the search engine. Again, we can use the 20-80 rule to expect 256k organic visits. Let’s say the blog is targeting long tail keyword. Every blog post targets one keyword that will bring 10 visits per day. This means that the blog post needs to have around 853 blog posts to generate 256k organic visits per month.
To generate a blog post that can reach 10 visitors per day, the blog owner needs to perform 4 hours of reading, keyword search and writing. To reach the 853 number of posts, it will take more than 20 months of full time searching, reading and writing!
]]>So what happens here is that Google is using not only using it’s influence to get content producers and bloggers of all kind to write about the Nexus One, but it is using it’s huge network of AdSense partners for the purpose of pushing for more ads. And guess what, all this extra traffic is free!
Of course, Google still has to pay when people click on those Nexus One AdSense links. However, when these ads it shows on irrelevant pages, chances of people clicking on them are lower. However, people are still exposed to the ad. Meaning that people are heavily exposed to the message of ‘Nexus One is out there, buy one!’ for a fraction of the price if Google paid for had it dealt with high traffic websites.
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