I'm curious about the eCPM numbers. I realize this number can vary wildly depending on your niche and the paticular advertisers who are buying the ads, but is $20/eCPM a reasonably attractive return for Adsense...in any niche?

Yes. Very good and in my experience looking at millions of web uniques over years, it would be VERY good indeed.

This figure would be based on many variables. The fundamental factor is how much clients end up paying for your keywords. In some industries, this can be very high, and others very low, ranging from $10 to $50 per click on some terms in industries like mesothelioma and other lawyer related terms, to as low as a few cents per click for everyday terms. You can go into the Awords system to evaluate which terms might bring more for your own industry.

Understand that your Adsense share of any Adwords price will not be 100% or even half that. It will vary. However, the more expensive terms do tend to increase your overall revenue per click.

Over many web-sites for several years, the usual return is somewhere around $6 to $8 CPM, and is often around $12 to $14 on weekends.

These are heavy traffic type sites, and CPM appears to go DOWN as unique visitors/day goes UP. This may be an automatic formula built into the Adsense algorithm. And it may explain why CPM is higher on weekends, as the traffic decreases by about 30% to 40% and CPM tends to indirectly follow that trend proportionally, in the inverse direction.

Hope that helps.

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I think $20 is very good. Our main site hovers between $20 and $45. But it is in a fairly competitive niche.

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And if you are in a fairly loosely targeted niche with loads of traffic - I think $3 eCPM is probably a good figure to aim for.

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