AdSense CPM Drops as Impressions Increase

One of the most intriguing statistics for me is that my effective AdSense CPM drops as the number of impressions rise.

It's frustrating, actually, because you want some predictability with your earnings. You'd like to know that if you earn "x dollars" with 1,000 impressions, you can earn "xx dollars" with 10,000 impressions.

I'd love to provide a graph from my own statistics to illustrate it for you, but AdSense's terms of service prevent me from disclosing that information.

It's not just AdSense, actually. It works this way for me with any advertising network or affiliate marketing program.

My explanation for this is that as your traffic increases, it becomes more diverse.

For starters, one of the primary causes of traffic increase is having published more pages. The more pages you publish, the more search engine food you create. Effectively, it's a like fisherman casting a wider net, catching more of the fish he wants, but also getting more fish he doesn't want.

The best way to guard against that, is to keep your focus on your primary audience, by writing articles whose keywords and filenames are optimized for that audience. That can be hard to do, because when you've written your 100th article, it's harder to find more stuff to write about.

Another reason for the increasing diversity of your audience, is that they're coming in from more places. When you write a compelling article, people tend to e-mail it to their friends, or post a link to it from a message board, or even blog about it on their own blogs. And when they do this, it's often for slightly different reasons than what you intended.

For example, if you write an article about how a blogger made a thousand bucks in one day using AdSense, one guy might e-mail it to his buddies because the photograph of the blogger shows she has big boobies.

Another nagging problem is Google's Image Search. Assuming you're putting images in your blog posts, people will eventually find those images through Google Image Search, and that will produce page views.

What can you do to help monetize this diverse traffic?



For all those page views created by Google Image Search, find an ad network that will pay "per impression" intead of "per click", and place one of their banners somewhere.


Place some promotional links in a highly visible place on your website, that link to some of your most popular content. Use heading text like, "Top 5 Most Popular Articles", or, "Top 5 Must Have Tools for Webmasters". If you don't have that stuff, try "Get Laid" and link it to a dating affiliate program.