Website Ad Revenue Calculator

What this ad revenue calculator does

You run a site with display ads on it, or you are thinking about starting one, and you would like to know what the traffic is worth. Or you have a traffic target and want to know whether the money at the end of it justifies the work.

This turns visits into revenue. Give it your visits, how many pages the average visitor looks at, and your page RPM, and it returns your total pageviews and what those pageviews earn.

Two pieces of arithmetic, and the second one depends entirely on a number you have to supply yourself. If you already run ads, your RPM is sitting in your dashboard. If you do not, there is a section on realistic ranges, though be warned that the spread is enormous.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing typed here is stored or sent anywhere.

How to use it

1. Visits. Sessions, in whatever period you care about. Your analytics will call these sessions or visits.
2. Page views per visit. Average pages per session. Two to three is typical for a blog, one to one and a half for a site people arrive at from search and leave immediately, higher for forums and galleries.
3. Page RPM. Revenue per thousand pageviews. This is the figure your ad network reports, not the CPM advertisers pay, and the difference matters.

Press Calculate. Press Reset to clear it.

The revenue comes back in whatever currency your RPM is denominated in, since the tool is just doing arithmetic on the number you gave it.

The formula

Two steps. First the pageviews:

Pageviews = visits × pages per visit

Then the revenue:

Revenue = (pageviews × page RPM) ÷ 1000

The thousand is where the M in RPM comes from. It is the Roman numeral, not the abbreviation for million, and RPM stands for revenue per mille, meaning per thousand.

Google defines page RPM the same way from the other direction: page RPM is estimated earnings divided by pageviews, multiplied by 1000. Their own example is 0.15 earned from 25 pageviews, giving a page RPM of 6.00. Our formula is that rearranged, so if you have an accurate RPM the two will always agree.

Which is worth knowing because it means you can check your own RPM rather than guessing. Take last month's actual earnings, divide by last month's actual pageviews, multiply by 1000. That is your real number, and it beats any benchmark table.

Whatever period you put in is the period you get back

There is no time field here, and that is worth pausing on before you read your answer.

The tool has no idea whether the visits you entered were a day, a month or a year. It gives you revenue for the same period you gave it traffic for, and nothing on screen says which.

Take 10,000 visits at 2.5 pages each with an RPM of 8. The answer is 200. If those were monthly visits, that is 200 a month, about 6.57 a day, 2,400 a year. If they were daily visits, the same 200 is 6,088 a month and 73,000 a year.

Same inputs, same output on screen, and 365 times apart in what it means. So decide your period before you type, and label the answer in your own notes. Monthly is the usual convention for site revenue and probably what you want.

A worked example

A blog getting 50,000 visits a month, with visitors reading 1.8 pages on average, at a page RPM of 12.

Pageviews: 50,000 × 1.8 = 90,000 a month.

Revenue: (90,000 × 12) ÷ 1000 = 1,080 a month.

So roughly 12,960 a year from display advertising, on a site doing 50,000 monthly visits in a decently paying niche.

Worth noticing which lever does what. Doubling the traffic to 100,000 visits doubles the revenue to 2,160. But so does lifting the RPM from 12 to 24, or lifting pages per visit from 1.8 to 3.6. Traffic is the hardest of those three to double and it is where most people put all their effort.

Pages per visit in particular is usually the neglected one. Internal linking, related posts and a site people want to keep reading move that number, and it flows straight through to revenue with no extra traffic at all.

RPM and CPM are different numbers

These get used as though they were interchangeable and they are not, which produces answers that are wrong by a factor of two or three.

CPM is cost per thousand impressions. It is what an advertiser pays for a thousand views of one ad unit. It is an advertiser-side number.

Page RPM is revenue per thousand pageviews. It is a publisher-side number, and it counts everything earned on that page across every ad on it.

The link between them is roughly:

Page RPM = ad units per page × CPM × fill rate

So a page carrying three ad units, at a CPM of 4.00, with 85 percent of requests filled, has a page RPM of about 10.20. Type the CPM of 4.00 into the RPM field here and you will understate your revenue by roughly two and a half times.

Two other RPMs turn up in dashboards and are worth telling apart. Impression RPM is earnings divided by ad impressions, so it measures how well each individual ad slot is paid. Session RPM is earnings per thousand sessions rather than pageviews, which is what some networks report, and it is always higher than page RPM because a session contains several pages. If your network quotes session RPM, use visits rather than pageviews as your base or you will double count.

What RPM you can realistically expect

If you already run ads, skip this and use your own figure. If you are projecting, here is the honest shape of it, with a warning attached: these are aggregated ranges reported across publisher communities and analytics providers rather than figures any network publishes, and the spread within any band is wide.

By network, and this is largely a function of how much competition each one brings to the auction:

By subject, which usually matters more than the network:

Three things move your number more than anything on those tables.

Where your readers are. Traffic from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia typically earns several times what the same pageviews earn elsewhere, because that is where the advertisers are bidding. A site with a million monthly pageviews from low-bid markets can earn less than one with a hundred thousand from high-bid ones.

What time of year it is. RPMs peak in the fourth quarter as advertisers spend their annual budgets, then fall sharply in January. A December figure is not a fair basis for an annual projection, and neither is a January one.

How new you are. New sites generally earn below these ranges for the first several months while the auction learns what the inventory is worth.

The practical advice: project with a conservative RPM, measure your real one after a month, and then use that.

Traffic needed to hit an income target

Running the arithmetic backwards is often the more useful direction. Monthly pageviews required, at various RPMs:

Read across any row and the case for niche selection makes itself. Earning 3,000 a month needs 600,000 pageviews at an RPM of 5 and 75,000 at an RPM of 40. Eight times the traffic for the same money, decided by what you chose to write about.

Read down and the scale of a full income becomes clear. Display advertising alone at a middling RPM needs traffic that takes most people years to build, which is why almost every site of that size also runs affiliate links, sponsorships or products. Ads are rarely the whole business.

The formula behind the table, if you want to run your own: pageviews needed = target ÷ RPM × 1000.

Questions people ask

What is a good page RPM?

It depends far more on your subject and your audience's location than on anything you can control quickly. Anything above 10 is respectable for a general site, finance and insurance regularly clear 20, and entertainment struggles to pass 5.

Can I put my CPM in the RPM field?

Not without converting it. Page RPM is roughly ad units per page times CPM times fill rate, so on a typical page the RPM is two to three times the CPM. Using the CPM directly will understate your revenue.

Is the revenue figure monthly or daily?

Whatever your visits figure was. There is no time field, so the output matches the period of the input. See the section above.

How much can I earn from 100,000 pageviews a month?

At an RPM of 5, about 500. At 20, about 2,000. At 40, about 4,000. The range is genuinely that wide and the niche is the main reason.

What raises RPM fastest?

Moving to a better network once you qualify is usually the single biggest step. After that, ad placement and viewability, page speed, and writing about topics advertisers actually bid on.

Does this account for ad blockers?

Not directly, but your measured RPM already does, because it is calculated from earnings you actually received divided by pageviews you actually served. If you are using a benchmark rather than your own figure, treat it as optimistic.

References

A note on sourcing. The RPM definitions and formulas used here are Google's own, as published in the AdSense help documentation. The revenue ranges by network and niche are a different kind of figure: they are aggregated from publisher community reporting and analytics providers rather than published by the networks themselves, they vary widely within any band, and they should be treated as indicative rather than authoritative. Your own dashboard is the only reliable source for your own RPM.

1. Google AdSense Help, Revenue per Thousand Impressions (RPM). https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/190515?hl=en
2. Google AdSense Help, Page RPM. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/112030?hl=en
3. Google AdSense Help, Ad RPM. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/112032?hl=en
4. Google AdSense Help, Impression RPM. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6157296?hl=en