As a publisher, you must constantly search for new and innovative ways to successfully monetize your website. Bringing traffic to your website and generating a significant revenue stream can be quite challenging, especially when facing a constantly changing industry.
If you have a top-notch website that easily generates a ton of organic traffic, you probably don’t have any issues with your monetization strategies. However, smaller websites that don’t generate traffic easily tend to resort to paid traffic.
One way to earn money for your website is AdSense arbitrage.
What Is AdSense Arbitrage?
Arbitrage is traditionally defined as the act of buying security or assets from one market and simultaneously selling it on another market at a higher price. This enables investors to generate profits from temporary shares, typically via the stock market.
When we define arbitrage in terms of Google AdSense ads, the concept of simultaneous buying and selling remains the same. Under normal circumstances of buying and selling, an ad vendor sells their ads at a price that allows them to garner a substantial profit.
With AdSense arbitrage, the publisher invests a certain amount of money into the ad placement to generate traffic for a website. More specifically, they use AdSense ads on their website or certain web pages that tempt visitors to click so they can earn money via AdSense.
When you break down AdSense arbitrage, you’re left with a free ad network (Google AdSense) and the payments per visitor (traffic) click.
Essentially, you’re getting traffic by buying traffic and then converting said traffic into paid clicks by running your AdSense ads. Therefore, the investment is in the paid traffic, and the trick is to generate higher revenue through the AdSense ads than you initially paid for the traffic.
Make sense?
How Does AdSense Arbitrage Generate Money?
So, you have your investment — the paid traffic — and you have your Google AdSense ads displayed for free.
Once the paid traffic is directed to your website, in theory, it should translate to increased ad impressions and click-through rates (CTRs). However, this isn’t always the case.
As we mentioned earlier, the trick is to ensure the revenue you generate turns a higher profit compared to what you paid for the traffic. Therefore, the key to generating money with AdSense arbitrage is to buy your traffic for less than what Google AdSense is paying you to serve their ads.
To generate the most money with AdSense arbitrage,you should pay more attention to your revenue per one thousand impressions (RPM) than your click-to-conversion (CTC) rates or cost-per-click (CPC) rates.
While it’s always important to continuously track your CTC and CPC metrics, your RPM can give you a better idea of your earnings potential using digital arbitrage. Additionally, your AdSense RPM is affected by your CPC, which is why you can’t ignore your other metrics entirely.
You can calculate your RPM by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of impressions, page views, or queries received. From there, you can multiply that number by 1000.
So, if your CPC is $0.50 per click, your RPM will be $10.
Therefore, you would need to pay significantly less than $10 when buying traffic to generate a decent revenue stream using AdSense arbitrage.
What Google Has to Say About AdSense Arbitrage
It’s safe to say that Google caters to advertisers. Therefore, when it comes to AdSense arbitrage, their primary concern is to ensure that what publishers gain from traffic arbitrage doesn’t negatively impact advertisers.
That means publishers must ensure that they’re not violating any AdSense or AdWords policies while engaging in the digital arbitrage process.
In a nutshell, publishers should avoid suspicious traffic sources as well as destination pages. If you’re a publisher, you can read more about the AdSense guidelines here to make sure you don’t end up crossing any lines with digital arbitrage.
How to Get Website Traffic for AdSense Arbitrage
The goal behind AdSense arbitrage is to make money fast. This goal is typically achieved via paid traffic — hence the entire concept of digital arbitrage.
That’s not to say that keeping SEO best practices in mind to gain organic traffic isn’t important, because it is. It’s just not the topic we’re discussing today. However, we’d like to emphasize that search engine optimization isn’t merely a suggestion — it’s an integral part of website creation and maintenance.
Now, when it comes to buying website traffic for AdSense Arbitrage, a few of the top sources that can help are Facebook, Taboola, and RevContent.
Facebook is primed with quality traffic for websites due to audience targeting.
If you can leverage Facebook to generate traffic with good CPC rates, then you’ll be able to garner significant CTRs on those same ads.
Keep in mind, however, that 75% of Facebook’s traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, you’ll need to prioritize mobile traffic by ensuring that your website is optimized for mobile formatting.
Taboola
Taboola is a native advertising platform that can help you put all of your content resources, like your blogs, to work.
The platform allows you to target the audience that will have the greatest impact on your CTRs to drive traffic to your AdSense ads.
RevContent
RevContent is another platform that can help you leverage your content to get more traffic. This platform specifically uses location and device-based targeting which offers you more control over your content promotion strategy.
The platform even has its own widgets that complement Google AdSense to help you generate that extra money.
Parting Words
It’s important to remember that when it comes to AdSense arbitrage, your website still needs to offer value to the users coming through. So, make sure that your destination page is legitimate and makes good on the promises it’s offering. Additionally, make sure that it’s also user-friendly and optimized per Google’s standards.