AdSense is probably the most popular Pay Per Click (PPC) program for publishers. Google, the company behind AdSense, always shows relevant ads regardless of page content. This is very important because irrelevant ads will attract fewer visitors. The cost per click (CPC) depends on the market niche. It may be only a hundred, but you can also get a few dollars for a single click. Since the average cost of each keyword or search phrase is publicly known, many internet marketers are trying to optimize their websites for those high paying keywords. Many of these attempts fail and blame Google for it. The truth is that failure could be predicted. If you want to be successful in internet marketing, including AdSense, you need to understand that you need traffic.

Traffic means visitors coming to your site. When they visit your site, they will be looking for interesting content. If they find your AdSense ads interesting, they will click on them and you will get paid for it. The best and cheapest source of visitors is traffic from web search engines, especially Google. To get search engine traffic, your website must be present on the first page of search results. The first position gets about 42% of the clicks. For lower positions, this number is significantly reduced. Therefore, you should target keywords that have high search volume and low competition. So called “high paying keywords” have a lot of competition and you will never get a high ranking and consequently the required traffic.

The second reason to avoid targeting high CPC keywords is the source of the AdSense ads. Those ads don’t appear automatically; there are some AdWords advertisers that manage ad campaigns. AdWords advertisers can choose where their ads appear. The first option is the search results pages. Whenever someone searches for your target keywords, your ads will show next to their search results. This is high-quality traffic because those searching for a specific keyword are actually searching 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 choose to advertise on content pages, they carefully select the websites where their ads will be displayed. The reason is simple. If you pay a lot for advertising, you make sure that this investment will return. Of course, this doesn’t mean that high cost-per-click ads won’t appear on websites like AdSense, it just means there’s less chance of getting those high-CPC ads.