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Maybe you've just implemented Google AdSense on your website. Maybe you've been pulling in ad revenue for a while but feel unsure that you're making as much as you should. Or perhaps, you’ve seen tremendous traffic growth and feel your current ad revenue generation simply isn’t keeping pace. In any case, the underlying question remains the same: how much ad revenue can a website make? In truth, there is no upper limit. However, some common traffic benchmarks can provide insight into how much ad revenue you could make with more website traffic, and whether you're making enough right now. Let's dive into the primary traffic metrics you need to know to determine if your website is earning as much ad revenue as it should be. The Playwire team has gathered this information through years of helping publishers and content creators maximize their ad revenue. We know what we're doing and can get your revenue where you want it to be. Contact us to learn more!Key Points
- And there are always ways to increase your revenue within the ad space.
Website Ad Revenue Metrics Based on Page Views
Historically, websites have earned monthly ad revenue based heavily on the number of monthly page views so we'll begin there.
Below are several key benchmark ranges based on page views.
- 500K monthly page views: $1,000 - 5,000 per month
- 1M monthly page views: $2,500 - 25,000 per month
- 5M monthly page views: $10,000 - 100,000 per month
- 10M monthly page views: $25,000 - 250,000 per month
- 20M monthly page views: $50,000 - 700,000 per month
- 40M monthly page views: $100,000 - 2,000,000 per month
But, the performance metrics you need to know don’t end there.
The ad tech landscape is ever-evolving meaning website owners and publishers must constantly be shifting to meet new challenges. This includes a shift toward tracking sessions, in addition to page views, to identify a broader view of the user journey, considering all interactions within a session.
Let’s explore why.
Page views vs. Sessions
To be clear, both page views and sessions over a specific period provide important information about your overall website traffic and can inform the prices you set for your digital ad space.
However, there are key distinctions between the two online advertising metrics that are important to understand.
What is a Pageview?
A pageview refers simply to a user viewing a page on your website including every single time a user loads a page. This means every time a user refreshes a page, that will count as a new pageview.
Page views are good to use in instances where publishers want to understand how ads are performing relative to the number of pages viewed.
This is good for publishers with websites that include:
- Users that tend to view multiple pages in a single session,
- Content-heavy pages, where ad revenue is closely tied to the number of pages viewed.
What is a Session?
A session includes a single website visit by a user including the many actions a user takes on your website from the first interaction to either when they leave your site or after 30 minutes of inactivity. This metric provides tracking information about the pages they clicked while on your website.
Sessions are incredibly useful for publishers who want to better understand the revenue generated per visitor or session, giving a broader view of how much revenue a typical user session brings in, regardless of how many pages they view during that session.
This is good for websites where:
- User engagement per session is critical, such as websites with fewer, but more targeted pageviews per visit,
- Analyzing revenue on a per-visitor basis is most important,
- Understanding the overall effectiveness of your website, including factors like user engagement, session length, and bounce rate, is key to generating ad revenue.
Why Measure Sessions vs. Page Views?
Session RPM is a more comprehensive and insightful metric when your goal is to optimize for the overall quality of user engagement, understand visitor value, and drive long-term growth.
Session RPMs push publishers to look beyond mere page views and consider the full context of user interactions, leading to content and monetization strategies that enhance the user experience and revenue-earning potential.
Further, sessions more effectively reflect user engagement and experience. Some of the results of this include:
- Providing a broader view of the user journey by considering all interactions within a session, emphasizing the importance of the entire experience rather than just individual page views.
- A high Session RPM suggests that users are not just clicking through pages but are actually engaging with content in a way that drives higher overall revenue.
- Session RPM measures the value of each visitor, indicating how loyal the user base is, helping you to convert sessions into revenue better.
- Session RPM accounts for varying pageview behavior, such as users skimming through multiple pages quickly.
- Session RPM encourages long-term growth since the focus shifts to the value of sessions, which can lead to decisions that improve user loyalty, user experience, and content relevance.
- And there are always ways to increase your revenue within the ad space.
Website Ad Revenue Metrics Based on Sessions
Without further ado, below are several key benchmark ranges based on sessions.
- 500K monthly sessions: $5,000 - $10,000 per month
- 1M monthly sessions: $10,000 - $25,000 per month
- 5M monthly sessions: $50,000 - $185,000 per month
- 10M monthly sessions: $100,000 - $400,000 per month
- 20M monthly sessions: $200,000 - $900,000 per month
- 40M monthly sessions: $400,000 - $2,000,000 per month
Keep reading to explore how much advertising revenue your website can make, and how you can ensure you are on track to make the revenue you deserve based on your current monthly sessions.
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Read The Publishers' Guide to Ad Revenue
Ad Revenue Breakdown by Monthly Sessions
Never let an online ad revenue calculator be the last word on how much ad revenue you, as a website owner, can make. Instead, rely on data gathered by the ad tech industry experts at Playwire. Here's a potential website ad revenue breakdown by monthly sessions:
500,000 SESSIONS
At half a million sessions per month, your website is starting to hit the big time, but that may not be paying all the bills. You should be making at least $5,000 per month in website ad revenue at this level, but we have seen the top websites in our ad network make upwards of $10,000 per month at this level.
1 MILLION SESSIONS
Things are heating up at 1 million monthly sessions. If you're not pulling in at least $10,000 per month in ad revenue at this level, you are likely doing something wrong. But even that is the very low end for this tier - some Playwire publishers have reached $25,000 per month with 1 million monthly page views.
5 MILLION SESSIONS
Anything less than $50,000 per month at 5 million monthly sessions is unacceptable. But really, with this much website traffic, you could be pulling in up to $185,000 per month - depending on your niche and various other factors. Still, it's possible - we've helped publishers in our ad network hit this level.
10 MILLION SESSIONS
You're pretty much a household name when you're pulling in 10 million sessions every month, and your ad revenue should reflect that. Expect no less than $100,000 per month in ad revenue with this much traffic. But keep in mind that the revenue possibilities are enormous at this phase: Some publishers pull in as much as $400,000 every month with 10 million monthly sessions.
20 MILLION SESSIONS
The vast majority of publishers will never come close to 20 million sessions per month. If you're among the elite few who reach this level, congratulations - you could make as much as $900,000 in ad revenue every month if you're maximizing every available source of ad revenue. At the very least, publishers at this level will bring in $200,000 per month.
40 MILLION SESSIONS OR MORE
How does $2 million per month sound? Playwire has seen publishers in our network bring in that much ad revenue once they cross the 40 million monthly sessions threshold. Even if you're not working with a partner like Playwire, you should still be making $400,000 per month minimum at this number of sessions.
Please keep in mind that these ad revenue breakdowns are based on publisher sites with the majority of their traffic coming from the United States.
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The Complete Ad Revenue Resource Center
Factors That Affect How Much Ad Revenue a Website Makes
Did you notice the huge ranges in possible ad revenue at the various session tiers? Those big margins tell us that several factors contribute to your overall ad revenue earning power.
Here are some of the most impactful factors that can push you from the bottom of your revenue tier to the top:
AD UNITS
Bottom-tier ad revenue numbers are usually associated with basic (borderline boring) website ads. Think of display ads such as banner ads, native ads, and basic video ads. There's nothing wrong with incorporating a standard ad format here and there, but their CPMs are simply way lower than those of a premium ad unit like rewarded video ads, flex leaderboards, flex skins, sticky ads, interstitial ads, and the like.
AD PLACEMENT
There are several reasons why every publisher should be concerned with ad placement and ad density, most of which tie directly back to your ability to earn revenue.
Some of these key factors include:
- User experience: Nothing makes a user more unhappy than ad clutter or poor ad density. It is imperative to customize your ad layout to ensure your audience remains unobstructed by their ad experience, ultimately remaining on your site longer and continuing to visit in the future.
- Supply and demand: You need to find the perfect balance between supply and demand to maximize top-line revenue.
Quality vs. quantity is becoming an increasingly important narrative in the ad tech industry. We have found through our QPT initiative, driven by a focus on quality, performance, and transparency, that Playwire publishers with fewer, more relevant ad placements on the page see an average 58% increase in revenue.
Interested in learning more about how our QPT initiative is transforming publishers’ including increased viewability, traffic, and returning users? Let's Chat!
DEMAND
Every time an ad request isn't filled, you leave money on the table. And even if your fill rate is high, you may have lower CPMs than you should if you haven't sourced quality demand for your ad inventory.
Whether you're doing programmatic, header bidding, direct sales, or some combination of those, you need to ensure that you have broad, but quality demand from multiple sources. Google ad demand is great, but it's not the only source and shouldn't be the only source of demand you incorporate.
YOUR AD TECH STACK
One of the key differences between you and a publisher with the same number of sessions who makes more than you is probably your ad tech stack - that is, the suite of tools you have chosen to make your digital advertising efforts work for you.
Data Solutions
Are you using a data management platform (DMP)? If not, you're missing the opportunity to create extremely valuable audience segments that can command top dollars from major brands.
Not to mention, due to growing privacy regulations such as the slow but steady disappearance of third-party cookies, the once-essential world of third-party data is becoming more obsolete every day, while the importance of first-party data solutions, such as Hashed Email, grows.
DMPs play an essential part in publishers' efforts to maximize their revenue, a fact that grows even more so by the day.
SEO and Ad Revenue
For most publishers, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most important source of website traffic, laying the groundwork for a sustainable online presence.
With less than 1% of searchers ever clicking on the second page of Google search results, improving your site’s ability to be found by the right users is about much more than crafting great content.
It’s about building a strong SEO strategy that includes an optimized content strategy, effective technical SEO implementation, faster page load speeds, and improved Core Web Vitals.
WHO YOU'RE WORKING WITH
Ad tech is just one of those industries that attract a lot of players with big egos but little in the way of actual skill. If you're working with one of those players to increase your ad revenue, you may not be blown away by the results.
If you're unhappy with your current revenue partner, remember: You're not stuck with them. And making a change could make the difference between bottom-tier ad monetization and top-tier.
Measuring Ad Revenue Metrics
The simple act of knowing what to measure, and being vigilant about measuring it will help in your journey to increasing ad revenue.
Knowing which metrics to monitor, and how frequently to look at them, is the first and foundational step in maximizing your ad revenue.
Learn about each of the most important metrics you should be looking at to track ad revenue, and alert yourself to future revenue drops (or opportunities for increased revenue), and find out how to dig deeper into each of these metrics to diagnose problems.
Check out our guide for more information on website ad revenue metrics: How to Manage and Monitor Your Website Ad Revenue Metrics.
It’s also important to have a clear understanding of how ad revenue is trending across the industry. Luckily, Playwire has built just the tool.
The Publisher Earnings Index (PEI) is a tremendous indicator of the state of the industry, allowing you to monitor the health of total ad revenue and see earnings trends materialize over time.
Get More Ad Revenue with Playwire
We covered a lot of shoulds and coulds in this post, but will you do what it takes to take your website monetization to the next level to increase your website ad revenue?
If you don't have the time to do yield optimization, incorporate premium ad units, optimize and implement your custom ad layout, manage direct sales, header bidding, and more, you may want to call in the professionals at Playwire. And we'll be happy to make it happen for you so you can focus all your time on creating high-quality content.
How much ad revenue can a website make? With Playwire, expect the maximum earnings for your website advertising.
Ready to get started? Reach out to our team online today.
Additional Website Ad Revenue Content
Browse some of our additional resources about website ad revenue:
- Ad Revenue Calculator
- Increasing Ad Revenue with Revenue Intelligence
- 6 Ways to Increase Website Ad Revenue
- How to Generate Website Revenue from Ads
- Header Bidding Solutions: Maximizing Revenue from Header Bidding
- How Much Ad Revenue Can a Website Make?
- Ad Revenue Estimates Suck. Here’s Why.
- Online and Mobile Ad Revenue Statistics
- Mixing Ad Revenue and Subscription Revenue Models with Rewarded Video Ads
- Freemium Revenue Models and Rewarded Video Ads
- Ad Revenue vs. Subscription Revenue
