What Content Niche & AdSense Topics Produce The Highest Earnings?

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What Content & AdSense Topics Produce The Highest Earnings?

What Content Niche & AdSense Topics Produce The Highest Earnings?

We’ve previously discussed how to identify which content is your highest-earning and write about subjects that are likely to produce higher income. Now, I’ll show you how to specifically target high earning content and AdSense topics that will likely help you produce higher ad earnings on your website.

Below, I’ll show you how to study your existing landing page EPMV, most successful categories, author metrics, and related keywords to attract advertisers that can make you more money.

Additionally, I’ll show you a few cool hacks for finding out which relevant niche topics and AdSense topics produce the highest advertiser competition within your realm of expertise so you can go after content that will produce higher ad earnings.

I recently released a video for Ezoic Explains going over the topic, but I will walk you through step-by-step below.

How much money can you make from 1,000 website visits?

How much money a website makes from display advertising or AdSense can vary dramatically. 1,000 visits could generate less than $1 USD or potentially $500 USD in display ad revenue depending on thousands of factors.

For advertisers, it’s no secret that certain audiences are just simply worth more than others. This means that certain topics connect specifically with audiences that advertisers covet (because of location, subject matter, etc.). Advertisers will bid more for impressions on sites that feature access to their coveted audience.

However, it’s not just about advertisers bidding more. It’s about competition for bids as well. You want content that attracts an audience that lots of advertisers want to bid on.

NOTE: Below I show how to hack Google Ads to find the highest earning topic for YOUR site

How much money can you make from 1,000 website visits?

Simply writing about a topic won’t necessarily produce the audience that advertisers want; nor will it guarantee a whole lot of traffic. You need to be able to write content that attracts quality traffic (organic search is traditionally one of the best ways — here’s a way to get organic traffic to a keyword fast).

What’s more, Insurance, Medicine and Travel are all traditionally high-earning topics, but not every publisher can cater their content to those subjects.

For example, if you have a website on pets, there may not be a lot of opportunities to target topics about travel that your site can rank for in search results.

So Tyler, how do you target topics that produce good traffic, get the right audiences, and produce the highest earnings?

Using both Ezoic and Google Ads (just for the tools —you don’t have to start an ad campaign), I’ll show you how you can look more granularly at relevant topics in your content to see what will attract the highest-earning advertisers.

What categories and pages are the most valuable?

Knowing which categories and pages of your site produce the most ad earnings will provide the foundation of targeting high-earning advertisers already in your niche.

This is better than outright knowing which content categories produce the highest earnings for all of AdSense or for all display revenue. Targeting content based on this information may be a total waste of time unless your site is equipped to rank for those keywords or target the same audiences as sites currently reaping the benefits of those content categories.

inside of ezoic's big data analytics looking at categories

For Ezoic users, the free Big Data Analytics application provides metrics on page and website performance, user and traffic trends, and much more. I’ll be walking you through Big Data Analytics and finding your categories and pages using my small jiu jitsu website as a simple example.

In Big Data Analytics, navigate to the ‘Content’ tab and select ‘Categories.’ I never set any categories for this site, but most publishers will have a handful of categories. The top category with a name on this site is BishopBjj News.

make from Adsense with 1000 visitors per day?

If you use categories already on your site, this will typically provide some massive clarity on which ones are driving most of your revenue. In the example above, you can see that this site has one category driving the vast majority of the revenue (and they have over (10,000 pages).

Now that I know a category to target (based on what my site’s data might tell me), I can look at individual pages of the website to determine which provide the most value.

We’re going to determine which pages are the highest-earning by studying which pages have the highest EPMV (earnings per mille visitors).

As we’ve discussed before, EPMV is a better metric to study than RPM because it measures the value of a user’s entire visit, rather than just a single page. EPMV gives you a better idea of what pages provide the most valuable to the rest of your website.

Navigate to the ‘Content’ tab and then ‘Landing Pages’ to see how your individual pages perform. Studying your landing pages can give you a lot of information on the performance of your website, including revenue and traffic data.

Drag the EPMV column all the way over to the left and then sort it by highest EPMV, as we did with page RPM.

Landing pages provides data on traffic and revenue performance

In this tab, we can observe data on our users. We can see if a user visited subsequent pages, if they spend more time on these pages, and if advertisers are bidding more on these pages.

This data can be further segmented by adding filters to the results.

add a filter to the search results to better segment the data

On my tiny jiu jitsu site, the highest-earning EPMV page makes $28.20 per visitor session, which is significantly higher than the average EPMV of $2.99. However, this is a bad sample size, because the column next to EPMV shows us that the page only has one visit.

To filter out any pages with low visit rate, simply click ‘Add Filters’ and then filter for the number of visitors. This will give you a better idea of your most-visited and highest earning pages.

Who is writing your best content?

Big Data Analytics also lets you see which author is producing the highest-earning and most-visited content. To do this, select ‘Author Metrics.’ In this example, I am the only author, but a publisher with multiple authors would have a list of names here (I know, my site isn’t the best example).

However, if I had multiple writers or website authors, this would allow me to see who is earning the highest page RPM as well as how many articles they’ve produced in a certain time window. You can also see average articles per week.

You can see who your most-valuable author is in author metrics

This gives you a good idea which authors produce your best content, what their best categories are, and the landing pages they’ve produced.

Altogether, this should make clearer what subjects are making you the most amount of money and which author is providing the highest-earning content. This could also help you better negotiate what you pay writers and justify paying them to write more as well.

Does the website revenue come from the page or the visit?

From here, it’s important to understand which articles on the site are earning the highest EPMV and why. Some sites will be making the bulk of their revenue from single page visits. This means that page is attracting a valuable audience and good engagement; thus advertisers bid for space on that page (see how engagement translates to higher ad earnings here).

The alternative is that visitors are landing on a page, but visiting multiple pages — generating lots of ad impressions (and higher earnings). Every site is different.

visit depth shows how far visitors go into your website after landing on a page

Is your site generating most of your earnings from the content where visitors land on a page and stay, or is it the landing pages that lead visitors to other pages?

In Big Data Analytics, the ‘Visit Depth’ tab will show you how many other pages a user visited after landing on a specific page.

In my example, visitors don’t typically navigate to other pages after visiting the highest-earning pages. There are a couple of instances where people visit up to eight pages but mostly, visitors land on a page and then leave the site. This shows us that we can’t really rely on the visitors to visit a bunch of extra pages, so we should really focus on engagement on the pages they are on.

Which niche pays the highest in AdSense and other non-Google networks?

Now that we know our most popular categories, the highest-earning content per session, which writers are producing that content, and how our audience behaves, we can begin writing content that will catch the attention of high-bidding advertisers.

Remember, the internet is filled with shady operators looking to make fast money off of writing about “the highest earning AdSense niche”. This is a bad strategy. 

What you want to do is target the most relevant topics you can in your niche that are most likely to produce the highest advertiser bids and competition from multiple bidders.

To do this, I’ll use Google Ads to better understand how advertisers are behaving in my niche.

Step 1: Create a Google Ads account (don’t worry, you won’t have to use it)

This in no way means you have to begin advertising with Google Ads; we’re simply going to use the tools within it. It will ask you to set up a campaign and such, but you can create a fake campaign and just pause it. You can see here that the campaigns are ‘paused or removed.’

use google ads to find related keywords
This is fine. Don’t set up a campaign.

Step 2: The tool we want in Google Ads is the NEW Keyword Planner, which you can find in the left panel. Then, open the application.

As we found before, one of the best categories on the jiujitsu website was BishopBJJ news. There are many filters you can apply here, but I highly recommend selecting ‘Related ideas.’ This will provide information on topics similar to jiujitsu news but not quite as broad.

filter related ideas broadly or closely

If you have a topic that is very broad, like jiu jitsu news, I would select ‘Broadley related ideas.’ If your content is a bit more specific, such as musical artists, you may want to select ‘Closely related ideas.’

There are many filters you can include, such as excluding adult ideas.

Step 3: I can see keywords associated with different monthly searches, how competitive they are, the ad impression share, and the top-of-page bid. Though these are search ads versus display ads, it gives us an idea of what advertisers are bidding the highest on.

google ads will show you related keywords and how much they're worth

Step 4: From here, sort the results for ‘Top of page bid.’ As we can see, the highest-bidding topics are jiujitsu tattoo, jiujitsu positions, jiujitsu versus karate, and pan jiujitsu, which is a jiujitsu tournament.

This gives us me a good idea of what types of keywords and topics are the highest earning and how much competition there is for that keyword. These categories are a great place to start for creating content that high-earning advertisers will be attracted to.

EXAMPLE OF FINDING THE RIGHT TOPIC: Jiu jitsu tattoos would be an excellent topic to target for my website.

Using related keywords to target high-bidding advertisers

We now have collected all of the data we need to begin structuring content that may appeal to high-earning advertisers:

  1. Categories
  2. High-earning EPMV pages
  3. Author metrics
  4. Valuable Keywords/Topics

There are a few ways to go about targeting these advertisers and it will vary for each publisher and topic. If your visit depth is deep for your highest EPMV articles, you may want to consider what you can do to produce a series of articles versus a single article on the topic. Or, it may make more sense for you to only write one article.

For my jiu jitsu website, the average EPMV was $2.39. As we determined earlier, jiujitsu is a very broad topic. In this example, I may begin to write content about jiujitsu tattoos. Whether or not I write a series on jiujitsu tattoos or a single article will depend on my audience and previous content’s performance.

In the end, it really all just comes back to using data and information to narrow down a subtopic that is earning slightly more than the average. By targeting these types of subjects, you could literally double the EPMV while also diversifying the content on your website.

If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to respond.

tyler bishop

By Tyler Bishop

Tyler is an award-winning digital marketer, founder of Pubtelligence, CMO of Ezoic, SEO speaker, successful start-up founder, and well-known publishing industry personality.

30 comments

  1. You have all this data from your customers and a “which topics earn the highest” doesn’t have an actual list of high earning topics?

    I get that you’re trying to get people on your platform but wouldn’t giving people ideas to build actually get you high-paying customers in the future?

  2. You have all this data from your customers and a “which topics earn the highest” doesn’t have an actual list of high earning topics?

    I get that you’re trying to get people on your platform but wouldn’t giving people ideas to build actually get you high-paying customers in the future?

  3. Korrak, it is different for every site and not every site can write about any topic and have it be valuable. Simply trying to find a niche that a cohort of other websites have written about and produced high earnings is not a good direction. It would be leading publishers to writing content that might not produce the same results for themselves.

    That’s why I have outlined this data this way. This is a much more scalable and practical approach.

  4. Korrak, it is different for every site and not every site can write about any topic and have it be valuable. Simply trying to find a niche that a cohort of other websites have written about and produced high earnings is not a good direction. It would be leading publishers to writing content that might not produce the same results for themselves.

    That’s why I have outlined this data this way. This is a much more scalable and practical approach.

  5. I have created a very simple experiment for a few well-paid phrases but with a focus on content that is useful to the reader. I am interested in the results of this experiment, I will post it here in the commentary in a few weeks.

    Thanks for this article.

  6. I have created a very simple experiment for a few well-paid phrases but with a focus on content that is useful to the reader. I am interested in the results of this experiment, I will post it here in the commentary in a few weeks.

    Thanks for this article.

  7. Try working on long-tail keywords that you find in “people also search” results for top keywords in your niche.

  8. Try working on long-tail keywords that you find in “people also search” results for top keywords in your niche.

  9. Agreed with your point – high earnings don’t mean great niche target. I always suggest going from the more long-tail possible to then grow broader, not the other way around. Good to see the inner working of ezoic too 🙂

  10. Agreed with your point – high earnings don’t mean great niche target. I always suggest going from the more long-tail possible to then grow broader, not the other way around. Good to see the inner working of ezoic too 🙂

  11. This sounds like an old but good strategy to find valueable keywords to write about. You can try input your competitor website into the url address to check keyword potential as well.

  12. This sounds like an old but good strategy to find valueable keywords to write about. You can try input your competitor website into the url address to check keyword potential as well.

  13. The highest-paid niches are finances, medical, insurance, and technology/gadgets. Most of the bloggers make money by writing content about money-making and not because they like to, but because they can build a steady income from Google AdSense, compared with other niches.

  14. The highest-paid niches are finances, medical, insurance, and technology/gadgets. Most of the bloggers make money by writing content about money-making and not because they like to, but because they can build a steady income from Google AdSense, compared with other niches.

  15. This is really an eye opener. Thanks so much for this. I also intend starting a new blog that upcoming adsense publishers will love.

    From my years of experience, content that is not consumed once, has a less techy audience, has trending searches with a buyer environment will give you the best earnings and finally, thr source of your traffic or visitors location

    . I have multiple sites on different niches with Google Adsense and i have observed this to be true.

    Contents that will make users spend more time on your website like how to guides, tips, information etc. Content they will have no option to read till 100 percent or 5o percent of the page.

    Contents like download sites are just straightforward. Users don’t spend much time but just go looking for the link.

    Let’s say yiu have a great relationship blog. Who does not face relationship issues these days?

    Let’s say, you are interested in making your relationship better and hit a post on a site about relationships.

    Why wouldn’t you read everything to the end? Its something that solves your problem.

    Contents that don’t give information in detail usually have a bad bounce rate or time spent on site. And you know this is important.

    If you have users that naturally know too much about ads like the tech niches, you’ll get few clicks.

    The location of visitors really matters. 1 click could give you 3usd from USA and another country will give you 0.10 with the same click.

    Target USA, Canada, UK, Russia and other developed countries, you wouldn’t regret it.

    Also, content that revolves around an audience that has this buyer kinda stuff. Like a content that it’s users can easily spend online comfortably, it will help advertisers.

    Thanks once again for the eye opener.

  16. This is really an eye opener. Thanks so much for this. I also intend starting a new blog that upcoming adsense publishers will love.

    From my years of experience, content that is not consumed once, has a less techy audience, has trending searches with a buyer environment will give you the best earnings and finally, thr source of your traffic or visitors location

    . I have multiple sites on different niches with Google Adsense and i have observed this to be true.

    Contents that will make users spend more time on your website like how to guides, tips, information etc. Content they will have no option to read till 100 percent or 5o percent of the page.

    Contents like download sites are just straightforward. Users don’t spend much time but just go looking for the link.

    Let’s say yiu have a great relationship blog. Who does not face relationship issues these days?

    Let’s say, you are interested in making your relationship better and hit a post on a site about relationships.

    Why wouldn’t you read everything to the end? Its something that solves your problem.

    Contents that don’t give information in detail usually have a bad bounce rate or time spent on site. And you know this is important.

    If you have users that naturally know too much about ads like the tech niches, you’ll get few clicks.

    The location of visitors really matters. 1 click could give you 3usd from USA and another country will give you 0.10 with the same click.

    Target USA, Canada, UK, Russia and other developed countries, you wouldn’t regret it.

    Also, content that revolves around an audience that has this buyer kinda stuff. Like a content that it’s users can easily spend online comfortably, it will help advertisers.

    Thanks once again for the eye opener.

  17. This post exactly has what I’m looking for. I’m planning my content for 2020 and desiring to start/focus on high-earning keywords so it will have a higher/faster ROI. I’ve observed this column in Google Adsense and glad to find this article. I’d rather use GA as it is free and popular but might try others like what Ezoic has (is it free?). Thanks!

  18. This post exactly has what I’m looking for. I’m planning my content for 2020 and desiring to start/focus on high-earning keywords so it will have a higher/faster ROI. I’ve observed this column in Google Adsense and glad to find this article. I’d rather use GA as it is free and popular but might try others like what Ezoic has (is it free?). Thanks!

  19. Hi Tyler,

    Amazing Post! Glad you shared this post on topics which topics earns the highest adsense earnings. I am pretty impressed with this indepth content and how Ezoic tool helps in increasing earnings. But i have one question “Does this also work with media.net Ads??” .Please help me i am using media.net not using adsense.

    Cheers,
    Abhay

  20. Hi Tyler,

    Amazing Post! Glad you shared this post on topics which topics earns the highest adsense earnings. I am pretty impressed with this indepth content and how Ezoic tool helps in increasing earnings. But i have one question “Does this also work with media.net Ads??” .Please help me i am using media.net not using adsense.

    Cheers,
    Abhay

  21. Hi Abhay,

    If you want to sign up with Ezoic, you will have to apply for Google Ad Exchange, since we are a Google Certified Publishing Partner. Since we advocate transparency, you can keep your old ads set up and then we can split test your old ads vs. Ezoic to see which one gets you better results.

  22. Hi Abhay,

    If you want to sign up with Ezoic, you will have to apply for Google Ad Exchange, since we are a Google Certified Publishing Partner. Since we advocate transparency, you can keep your old ads set up and then we can split test your old ads vs. Ezoic to see which one gets you better results.

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