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The free money machine!
When I started thinking of applying for Google AdSense, this blog was receiving 10,000 unique visitors per month, who visited 30,000 times and read 250,000 pages. Google AdSense’s online earnings calculator suggested that those statistics should earn me about $1,000 a month.
That is not to be sniffed at, so I applied, and was granted a license to show Google Ads for AdSense.
However, it was a steep learning curve for me, and there was Covid, and I was getting into commissioning audiobooks from Dad’s novels. The audiobooks were going really well, and so Google’s AdSense took a back seat, along with the blog in general.
Looking back on it, that was a silly, naive move, since it had taken Dad more than ten years to build up the blog, and I threw away a lot of that effort chasing money.
Anyway, this year I have been concentrating on AdSense, but I have problems. To make Adsense work, you need an active website. The more active the better!
Google Tools
I use Awestats in cPanel for my statistics, as Dad did before for the figures above. It is depressing. I now receive 5,000 uniques (unique visitors), who make 15,000 visits and read 130,000 pages. So, about half of what used to happen.
Right?
Google Adsense
So, why does Google AdSense and Google Analytics report only 300 pageviews a month? Fifty times less?
Last year, the blog earned $2.10 all year. With all my extra work this year, I have earned 30c a month!
How can that be?
If 5,000 visitors are reading 130,000 pages, how can they only be clicking two or three times a month?
I can think of only two possible reasons.
- Google AdSense is not being displayed on all the visible pages
- Awestats is reporting falsely.
What do you think?
I blame Google AdSense 🙂 (not really).
Update March 2023: A high percentage of the pages on this blog were not being crawled. I think that the reason for this was a blog theme we used to use which would create ‘pages’ out of Twitter posts, categories and tags. It looked great having thousands of pages, but Google was not fooled because many of them had only ten words or less on them. We are now rooting those pages out and deleting them.
A worrying sign today, we had 6% more impressions than 28 days ago, and 7% more clicks, but the pay rate for them was $0.00 That doesn’t look good, does it?
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Sister blog: The Amiable Dragon
