Beginner · 4h 36m · 24 lessons
Google AdSense
The publisher's side of every other course here, and the arithmetic nobody publishes.
What you'll learn
- ✦Explain why your earnings are set by advertiser economics you don't control, not by how good your writing is
- ✦Track page RPM instead of clicks, impressions or daily earnings, and use it to compare pages, months and sites fairly
- ✦Find your own ad density optimum by testing, and expect it to be lower than the number of units you run today
- ✦Place ads where they're actually seen, and price the footer and top-of-page slots correctly against the first paragraph break
- ✦Read your traffic by source and country so you can direct promotional effort at what's actually worth the hours
- ✦Tell a seasonal dip from a real problem using year-on-year comparisons, and diagnose a revenue drop from three numbers
- ✦Choose what to write using real advertiser demand data, without crossing the line into a made-for-advertising site
- ✦Keep an AdSense account out of policy trouble, and get paid without the avoidable delays
- ✦Recognise when display advertising is the wrong instrument for the audience you've built, and name a better one
Part of these career paths
- Creator & Monetisation path · course 3 of 5
Certification projects
Build 6 projects to earn your certificate
Hands-on work that proves you can apply what you learned — part of the certificate requirements.
Syllabus
Module 1 · 45m
The publisher's seat Free
What you'll be able to do
- Explain why a publisher's earnings are set by the advertiser's economics, not by content quality alone
- Calculate RPM from click-through rate and click value, and say which of the two is the bigger lever
- Set up an AdSense account and ads.txt so nothing avoidable blocks approval or silently costs revenue
- Read the AdSense reports for what they actually mean, and avoid the metric that misleads by design
Module 2 · 46m
Placement, density and the reader Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Find the ad density that maximises revenue, instead of the one that maximises impressions
- Rank ad positions by real viewability, and stop over-valuing the top of the page and the footer
- Explain why a slow, ad-heavy page costs readers even before it costs ranking
- Decide between Auto Ads and manual placement based on what each one costs you in data
Module 3 · 46m
Traffic that pays Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Compare traffic sources by RPM and direct promotional effort at the ones actually worth it
- Explain the RPM gap by reader geography, and know what share of Western traffic changes it
- Tell a seasonal revenue swing from a genuine problem using a year-on-year comparison
- Find which pages carry most of a site's revenue, and decide what to do with the rest
Module 4 · 47m
Choosing what to write Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Use advertiser-demand tools like Keyword Planner correctly, knowing what actually reaches a publisher
- Apply the "would this exist if it earned nothing" test to keep content on the right side of policy
- Plan a hub-and-spoke section instead of a single page on a competitive, valuable subject
- Prioritise which ageing pages to refresh, using traffic decline and RPM rather than guesswork
Module 5 · 46m
Policy, invalid traffic and getting paid Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Explain why self-clicks and click-bombing are always detected, and know how to respond to each
- Tell a fixable policy notice apart from a violation that risks the whole account
- Complete AdSense verification and tax setup early enough to avoid avoidable payment delays
- Diagnose a revenue drop using pageviews, page RPM and coverage before assuming the worst
Module 6 · 46m
Beyond AdSense Locked
What you'll be able to do
- Decide when a page's audience is better served by affiliate, sponsorship or product income than display
- Explain why a header-bidding network can pay more even after taking a revenue share
- Price a direct sponsorship from a sponsor's customer economics, not from your own display RPM
- Compute your own revenue per hour and use it to choose where to spend effort next