Are Your 1 Million Page Views Per Month Revenue Expectations Correct?

Curious how much 1 million page views per month revenue you can expect to make once you reach that milestone?

Or perhaps you're a website owner already getting 1 million monthly visitors and want to know if your revenue is on target?

Or are you trying to find the right niche or business model to get into?

These are all good questions when starting an online business.

Let’s dive in.

Use This Simple Formula to Calculate Website Revenue

If you're starting an online business, it's difficult to know how much traffic you need to turn a profit. Or, maybe you're confident you can reach a certain traffic level and want to know how much money it'll generate.

I had the same questions and concerns a few months ago, so I searched high and low for a formula to work it out for me.

The formulas I share in this article are how those calculators work in the background.

Now, let's break down each part of the equation so you can understand what it means and why we need to include each part.

Traffic

The traffic is obvious, and we already know this number: 1 million visitors. But we need to know what that traffic is worth. And which traffic sources will be most effective for our focus.

Average product price

If you are selling products, you’ll need to know your average product price. If you sell some products at $20 and others at $300, out of all the products sold over a month, you’ll end up with an average.

Product landing page ratio

Then, you need to know the number of people who land on a product page.

If half of your traffic lands on the home page, About page, or any other page that isn’t a product page and they leave immediately, then only 50% of your traffic might buy something.

Sales conversion rate

Then there’s your sales conversion rate. This is the number of people who land on a product page vs. the number of them who make a purchase.

So, if your average product price is $60 and 40% of your traffic lands on a product page, and you convert 10% of those people into a purchase, your monthly revenue will be $2.4 million.

As this example is for an e-commerce site, you’ll have to account for the cost of products, product storage and distribution, transaction fees, ad spend, etc.

What Does 1 Million Page Views Per Month Revenue Look Like?

There’s a big difference between the accuracy of the formula and real-world results.

We can factor in some of these variables to calculate an estimate of revenue from 1 million visitors. However, we can’t predict the exact amount.

Here are some key factors to consider:

• The business model
• Quality of traffic (traffic sources)
• Your marketing strategy
• The numbers in your business

Business Model

As you saw in the example above, an e-commerce website can generate a lot of revenue from 1 million visitors, but there are a lot more overheads.

A content site monetized with Google adsense or affiliate marketing will generate much less revenue than other business models. However, the overheads will be considerably less, as your only costs would be maintaining the website and hiring writers.

Quality of traffic

Having 1 million visitors sounds great, but if your business is based in the U.S. and 80% of your traffic comes from India, it will not convert well, no matter the business model. So your traffic sources are key.

Your marketing strategy

Sending 1 million visitors from social media will require a well-thought-out marketing strategy. You'll need to think like a true digital media company because you must rely on impulse buys or get them in the right mood to click over your site.

The numbers in your business

When you account for factors like average product price and conversion rate, you can see huge differences in revenue, even with a 1 percent increase.

Now, let’s look at an affiliate website example to see how much money a million visitors could generate.

How to Calculate Affiliate Site Revenue

To work out the revenue with an affiliate site, you’ll need to account for additional variables than you would for an e-commerce site.

With an affiliate site, you’ll need to know the average product price and conversion rate like before, but there are also a couple of other factors involved.

Average commission rate

Let’s say your affiliate niche is headphones and other audio equipment and you use Amazon Associates. Your commission rate would be 3%.

That means, on a product sale of $100, you’ll make $3.

But just note that there's a wide range for these commissions. A digital product or service like web hosting providers will pay you recurring commissions.

CTR

CTR stands for Click-Through Rate, which means the number of people who click through to the affiliate product sales page vs. the number of people who visit your website.

For example, if 250,000 people click through to Amazon, your CTR would be 25% out of 1 million visitors to your website.

1 Million Page Views Per Month Revenue: Affiliate Example

Now, let’s look at a theoretical example of an affiliate site promoting headphones.

We can be really conservative and say the average product price is $50, even though some headphones sell in the $300-$500 range.

We know the commission rate is 3 percent and we can keep the CTR and sales conversion rate at a low 10% and 5%, respectively.

So, if these were your exact numbers, your monthly revenue for 1 million monthly visitors would be $7,500.

If you track everything in Google Analytics well and do the work to improve them, your revenue could look more like this:

1,000,000 * (75 * 5% * 10% * 6%) = $22,500

This means that your revenue could be much higher with 1 million quality visitors and good copywriting on your website.

How to Calculate E-commerce Site Revenue

Let’s have a look at another e-commerce example, this time, with some products in mind.

In this example, let’s imagine you want to sell smartwatches, ranging around $150 each.

Let’s also imagine you’ve been running the business for 2 years and have optimized your internet marketing strategy and conversion rate.

So, in this scenario, 1,000,000 visitors will generate $3,600,000. Just keep in mind that this is highly theoretical and I’m grabbing these figures out of thin air.

You will want to take other things into consideration, like refunds, increasing your average order value, or where your traffic is coming from.

How to Calculate Revenue for a Website Displaying Ads

Do you want to start a content site monetized with display ads (like Google adsense, Mediavine, or another ad network) and want to know how much income you can make with 1 million monthly visitors?

As I’ve already mentioned, these equations are just a guide. You can use them to get a rough idea of how much money online you can make with a website.

So, in this example, all you need is the RPM. This stands for Revenue Per Mille, which means 1 thousand impressions.

Some niches like insurance and real estate will have a higher RPM, closer to $100 or more.

The difficulty with calculating revenue per visitor is that 1 visitor might see more than 1 ad impression. Then again, 20% of your traffic might use ad blockers, which will skew the overall results.

For the sake of this example, let’s imagine that each unique visitor on average accounts for 1 ad impression.

So, an RPM of $15 would generate $15,000 per month with that much traffic. If your site was in the insurance niche and you had an RPM of $100, your revenue would be closer to $100,000 per month.

Niche Site Income Case Study

To give you an idea of how much a website can make from ad revenue and affiliate marking combined, let’s look at a real-life case study from Niche Site Project 4.

In the report, we can see that his ad revenue for the month of April 2021 was $2,911.78:

He also made $2,298.50 in affiliate revenue promoting products on Amazon:

And his overall traffic for the month of these earnings was 172,123 pageviews:

This brings a total revenue of $5,210.28 from 132,614 visitors. That means this website made 0.0392891 cents per visitor in April 2021.

It's likely these numbers would change when the traffic reaches these kinds of numbers, but it doesn't stop us from theorizing.

In Spencer's income report, he mentions the site had a little over 600 articles. That gives us an average of 221 visitors per article, which equates to 4,524 articles needed to reach 1,000,000 visitors.

This Website Receives 1.3 Million Visitors and $80,000+ Per Month

Here's one last example of an actual website getting over 1 million visitors per month.

We can compare it to Spencer’s example to see if the numbers are close.

He shares income reports of his digital publishing portfolio, where his main site receives over 1 million visitors per month. In his August 2021 update, his revenue hit $80,530.

Here are his overall stats for that site:

• Revenue = $80,530
• Visitors = 1,382,142
• Revenue per visitor = 0.0582646 cents
• No. of Articles = 6,780
• Average visits per article = 204

On average, Jon is getting slightly less traffic per article than Spencer’s site, but earning more per visitor. That means Spencer’s old niche site has the potential to get close to these numbers by adding an extra 5,654 articles.

Again, it’s not an exact science as these other websites are relying on organic traffic from Google, so actual results could vary. However, these two examples are fairly close in numbers.

Concluding on 1 Million Page Views Per Month Revenue

So, there you have it. I hope this has helped you learn how much revenue a website with 1 million visitors per month can make.

As I mentioned throughout the article, calculating your revenue based on these variables can give you a rough idea, but in real-world results, nothing beats the actual numbers in your business.

With that said, learn how to start a blog now and work your way up to 1 million monthly visitors.

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