You’ve been building up your website for some time now and you’re ready to start monetizing with Google Adsense. Ah yes, the joys of passive income. It’s time to turn your hard work into hard earned cash. But is Google Adsense the best program to do this or are there better alternatives?
What are the best Google Adsense alternatives? The best Google Adsense alternatives are Ezoic, Mediavine, and Amazon Associates. Ezoic has a terrific algorithm to improve on-site ad revenue, Mediavine is easy to use and has shown ad revenue increases of 80%, and Amazon Associates—while a different ad initiative—is a viable option for sites with higher traffic.
There are many ways to monetize a website with good traffic. Which one is right for your website? That depends on a lot of factors. Let’s dive into each option to see if we can improve your website revenue.
What is Google Adsense?
Google Adsense is a marketing platform that allows website owners and bloggers to place Google ads on their website and make revenue. You tell Google where to place the ads on your website, what type of ads you’ll permit, and Google will do the rest. Depending on how competitive your website niche is, the value of each ad will be determined by buyer bidding. This bidding process will determine how much money you’ll make.
How much money can I make with Google Adsense? There are many websites that make tens of thousands of dollars with Google Adsense. These websites also attract millions of visitors and can monetize their visitors effectively. But what is realistic? That answer totally depends on your traffic. You’ll need to know a few terms and then you’ll be able to calculate your potential earnings.
Page Click Through Rate (CTR): The page click the rate is the number of clicks your webpage gets divided by the number of ad exposures. Let’s say you have 1000 people visit your webpage and 10 click on an ad, you’ll have a click through rate of 1%. You can expect at least a 1% click through rate on most websites. If your site doesn’t look like a spammy 90’s site and is niched well, you may average 2-3%.
Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost per click is how much each click means to you in dollars. If you have a CPC of $1, that means every ad someone clicks on your webpage will put $1 in your bank account. The average CPC in the United States is between $1 and $2.
Putting it all together: Let’s do a fun exercise. Let’s take a moderately successful blogging site and determine the earnings.
- Traffic: 30,000/month
- Click Through Rate: 1%
- Cost Per Click: $1.50
- Calculate: Of your 30,000 visitors, 1% will click (300 clickers). When they click, you’ll make $1.50.
Drumroll please…
You’ll make $450 this month! Not bad, not bad. With some work, you can get to 30,000 visitors if you aren’t already there. Google Adsense can make a lot of sense for lower traffic website owners. The requirements are minimal and you can steadily build up.
As you begin to increase in traffic, you may want to think about testing other Ad placement programs as well. Let’s discuss a few that work really well.
Is Ezoic a good Adsense alternative?
Ezoic Ads have really risen in popularity lately due to its ease of use, tasteful website placement, and earning potential. Marketers have raved about Ezoic “looking good” on their site. Ezoic is an Ad testing software that uses artificial intelligence to place ads that are most likely to perform well on your website. Many website owners are showing huge increases in their ad earnings by using Ezoic ads.
There are a lot of spammy Adsense alternatives that you should steer clear from, but Ezoic is not one of them. They have hung their hat on not only providing a fantastic ad platform, but they also creating phenomenal content and support to ensure your highest earning potential. Not only that, they are also a Google Ads partner—so you can feel good about their ad transparency.
In fact, this blogger recently increased her ad income by 200% using Ezoic ads. She noted that she was able to work one less day each week and spend more time writing and with her kids as a result. Not bad for a simple switch.
Imagine if you walked into work today, did the exact same job, but the name of the company changed and you doubled your paycheck working one less day per week? Pretty awesome right? We think so too.
There is one caveat: The entry requirements for Ezoic are higher. Typically, Ezoic will only accept your website if you consistently generate over 10,000 visitors each month. It’s not that they want to be sticklers for big sites, it’s that their A.I. technology requires enough data to find the best ad placements on your site to maximize revenue. There are some cases where people have been accepted with less traffic, but it’s not common.
Is Mediavine a good Adsense alternative?
Mediavine is a really good ad platform that you should strongly consider. There have been many people who have reported 50%-80% higher earning with Mediavine. As you search online, you’ll quickly find that people often switch between Mediavine and Ezoic ads.
Take for example Spencer at NichePursuits. On his site, he found that Mediavine was bringing in an extra 80% ad revenue. That is an enormous jump in website earnings. Spencer is a fan of Google Adsense and Ezoic, but in the case of his blog and readers, Mediavine happened to perform the best. This is often the case with ad programs—trial and error is key.
Like Ezoic ads, Mediavine is also a Google ads partner, so you can be sure that your site is in good hands. We’ve discussed site performance with a lot of site owners and most have nothing but positive things to say about Mediavine and site speed. It doesn’t appear that Mediavine would slow down your site loading times at all.
What are the Mediavine requirements? Mediavine measures site performance by page sessions. You will need at least 25,000 page sessions to be eligible to apply for Mediavine. This equates to around 30,000 page views. It’s a step up in traffic from Ezoic requirements and huge leap in requirement from Google Adsense. While many small sites aren’t getting this amount traffic, you can definitely scale to this readership with consistent content posting.
Is AdThrive a good Adsense alternative?
AdThrive is really, really good. It’s kind of the big dog on the block. You aren’t going to touch AdThrive with under 100,000 page views proven by Google analytics. Your traffic is also analyzed. They want to see the majority of your traffic U.S. based. Your content should also be pristine with a solid audience of affluent buyers.
Just like any ad platform, there are going to be raving fans and outspoken critics. But, AdThrive is great. One of the reasons we like AdThrive so much is because they work with you on ad placements. Nothing is placed without your permission. That enables you to maintain content consistency within you site.
On average, site owners can experience a 100-300% increase in ad revenue once switching to AdThrive. They are a premium service who pay premium fee’s (75% to you). Needless to say, AdThrive is generous.
Is Amazon Associates a good Google Adsense alternative?
We had to throw a dark-horse in here. Amazon Associates isn’t a direct competitor to Google Adsense, but the objective for any website owner is the same—make money. Outside of Google Adsense, Amazon Associates program is responsible for more blog revenue than any other source outside of direct website offers (courses, products, etc).
The more content and traffic your site generates, the more Amazon Associates commission you will see. Amazon will pay you when someone from your site clicks an Amazon product link and purchases the item on Amazon. You are responsible for creating the link and directing it to Amazon. An example would be a link just like this.
How you make money with Amazon Associates is simple. If someone purchases an Amazon product after clicking your link, you’ll make a commission as long as they purchase within 24 hours. If you create a special link that automatically adds the product to someone’s Amazon cart, Amazon will give you commission if they purchase within 90 days. That’s a topic for another article, but it’s a pretty neat strategy.
The commission structure is all over the board. Here is the fee structure direct form Amazon:
As you can see, depending on what niche you are in, the commissions will vary. Luxury beauty does extremely well (10% commission), but the niche is very narrow. On the other hand, Video Games are a huge niche with a lot of potential selling opportunities, yet the commission is very small (1-2%).
Most websites using Amazon Associates links will make 5-6% commission on average. This is quite good if you have enough traffic. A blogger at IncomeSchool made 147k in his first year with Amazon Associates. It should be noted that he has a ton of traffic, multiple blogs, and huge following; much more traffic than the average blog site.
But the point remains that Amazon Associates is a good program. Many bloggers will see better revenue from Amazon Associates than ad placement programs like Google Adsense in the early stages—especially if a few higher ticket items are purchased from Amazon.
Related Questions
How much money can you make with Google Adsense? There is no cap on earnings with Google Adsense. The more valuable your niche and the more traffic your drive, the more money you will make. The name of the game is earning more money per click. Your number one focus should be creating great content and driving as much traffic as possible to your site. Give, give, give and then you’ll get back later on. Also pay attention to where your traffic is coming from. Many sites have a lot of page views, but they are coming from countries with little purchasing power. Install Google analytics as soon as possible to analyze this data.
How much money can you make with Ezoic? As mentioned above, Ezoic ads is a tremendous ads program. Many people have experienced serious earnings. Smaller websites with 7k monthly visitors are earning up to $240 per month while larger websites with 100k monthly visitors are earning $7000 per month. The more traffic you generate, the more likely the Ezoic ad engine will work for you.
