When a company pays for clicks at this high rate means that the customer generated will generally mean thousands of dollars in revenue for one customer. So as an example - 20 clicks cost $1,000,for a $50 keyword, 1 of the 20 become a client or customer, which could = $3,000, $5,000 or more in revenue. That's only a .5% return and most high end companies can get 2% and up. So in a lot of cases pay $50 for leads is a bargain.

Great article ! I found it very interesting and usefull, Thanks !

Really not surprised that Google make 97% for their revenue from advertising. In fact I wonder what the metric is in total,for all the related businesses that effectively make a living out of helping people pay Google or trying how to leverage Google SERPS such as companies like ours.

In a way, from a marketing perspective 'search' industry is obviously becomming massive, where is it in relation to TV/Magazine/Print marketing industry? I'm sure thaere is some data out there on that. I'll go see if I can find some.

Quite good! Really an eye-opener this one. I for one, cannot even imagine paying $ 55 per click for a single visitor - who might not even buy. But then as a publisher, that is what we want ;)

This is still a great resource for affiliate marketers, I wonder the influence of the economy on some of these terms moving up and down, but I refer to thisquite often. Thanks,

Thanks for your great information. I came across your site via linkedin and i believe you make a good work here.

What a really useful piece of work, very interesting.

Thought that perhaps 'money' or similar would be up there too.

I wonder what a similar study for the UK would be like?

I would like to address the pie chart listing Insurance at 24% when it clearly looks like it is visually closer to 31%? Is it the numbers or the chart that is off, and what are you trying to get us to perceive here?

If it is 24%, 12% and 9% for the top three categories, then the last time I checked those three combined should cover less than half of the shiny colorful circle thing.

Wow, I knew insurance was big, but not that much bigger than the rest of the field.  Very interesting list of keywords, time to put the thinking hat on and come up with some good niches for websites and blogs! :)

Would someone actually pay $50 a click??  Surely now.  We pay a max of $2

It is really an aweseom list and helped me a great deal in reaching a decision for starting a couple of new blogs, purely from the perspective of Adsense Earning.

I am sure that these keywords will go a long way in helping people/ bloggers to earn more from Adsense.

Thanks a lot for thismagnificent list and above all, the tips to get the maximum from Adsense.

I will surely follow them!

Regards

Google paid search are getting too expensive for my keywords i.e. wholesale fashion, online fashion, online clothing etc...

I am turning to SEO and content building for my marketing now. It's a lot more work but definitely it's cheaper..

Interesting article, shame the infographics didn't load.  Trying to do research on the most competitive kw's in 

order to dissect their seo tactics and copy them.  At the moment using majestic seo, after trialling semoz

for their free trial.

seomoz definitely a lot more user friends vs majestic, although majestic seems to index quicker and be more up to date.

Is this article just for US traffic (my niche is ex-US).

Thanks God there isn't any holiday related term in there. Not a big surprise there, great info graphic by the way.

I liked the chart, it gives a broad idea niche which attract a highest bid. I would appreciate if you give some ideas on how to select a niche for adsense related blogging.

Great information, thank you. Although, I manage PPC for clients in these categories, and the highest I've ever had to pay to be No. 1 was about $11. I think whoever created this original information ironically may have been bad at AdWords management!

Google says it has three million customers that are used to generate a turnover of about $37bn and I cannot argue with how much revenue Google may get from Amazon or Ebay but I have to take  exception when it comes to the number of customers as being as high as three millions.

Currently I am working on a project that monitors a few hundred thousand parked domain / Cyber squatters that all use Google for adverts on these parked domains and some of these domains are giving out viruses that click the PPC/CPC links that lead back to Google-Lead-Services and Google's Double-Click and I record the Url of each target site of from Google advert in a database and to be honest I was expecting to see a couple of million records but I am struggling to find even 100k individual Urls and domain names and I have been using IP-Address based everywhere from India to the USA since Google's results are location specific.

Bottom line is Google is not sharing all the adverts from these 3m customers across the board so I need to go more direct or something very strange is going on and I cannot put my finger on it so maybe someone here can advise me as to where I maybe going wrong with my calculations.

i'm using google trends myself more and more to find better keywords.

Not only attorneys are in the top 10, also lawyers...

As i have personally checked the lawyers keywords are also very expenssive in terms of family law tree and mestholiam lawyers.

11$ also unbelievable expensive for me. 100$ its just 9 clicks!!

I am advertising in google adwords with greek keyword "insurance", i must admit that its expensive!

Is all about money after all!

Hi Larry thankyou for the info, how do I know about the most wanted or expensive locally or country it self..? Tks

What are the cheapest words to bid? It means that there is almost no competition for those words that could be used to sell products via inexpensive ads.

hi larry... how this HPK in 2012?

Larry, do you maintain a list of the top 20-50 words? thanks!

I honestly wouldnt have picked that list at all..maybe a few

Larry, this is why the website build around these expensive keywords do require lot of authority to get a good ranking in SERP. Thanks for posting on this.

this is such a hot fame now a days to find high cpc kewords, if somebody update recent cpc high paying keywords its help all for us

hi...i just came across this link through my recent study on keywords.... its really good to know these.... but this is last years ... anyone know about this years?

My website is at alexa 200k but i do not know why my keywords are not paying good , i am very sad any idea.?

hi, i just came across this link through my recent study on keywords, its really good to know these but this is last years did anyone know about this years?

Very nice article. I was making the posts without focusing the CPC of Keywords. Now i observed that my CPC is very low and i am not

satisfied. I am going to see the magic of these tools which you told in this article. lets see what happen. I will give you my feedback after using these toosl.

Keyword Density and Keyword CPC is very important even there is high competions for expensive keyword but this is better then low CPC.

Which keyword in health category is good to target?

This is an very informative report.  I suspected the top four, but I had no idea about the rest.  I can use this information to write my articles around these keywords.  Thanks again