Results of checking the boxes "search sites" and "content sites"

Stats and thoughts on these Adwords extras

[VisiBone]

For me, those "search sites" are very poorly qualified. I get double the clicks but far fewer sales. To be fair, I am basing this on a small amount of data. 6000 clicks over the last three days resulted in 6 sales and *all* of them came from google.com, none from the other domains. Roughly half the clicks came from google.com, and half from all other domains combined.

Google Adwords is profitable for me but not by a large margin. By checking the box "search sites in Google's network" (under Distribution Preferences in Edit Campaign Settings) it turned into a money-losing proposition.

Here is a table of click counts from Friday for all the domains that Google calls "search sites":

(all others)       177 
comcast          10 
google.ie         10 
earthlink         11 
aol            17 
updated          19 
msxml.excite       21 
metacrawler        24 
ms101.mysearch      26 
google.com.au       38 
groups.google       46 
dogpile          56 
google.ca         99 
google.co.uk       111 
netscape         130 
web.ask         255 
aolsearch.aol      297 
google         1349 
-------------------- ------- 
total          2686 

So checking "search sites" adds clicks from AOL, ask.com and Netscape primarily but many others as well.

The "content sites on Google's network" is a very different animal. From this I received very little traffic, only about 6 clicks out of 6000!

Of course, your mileage may vary.

-- Bob Stein, VisiBone

[johannes]

I get very bad conversion from updated.com. When I look in my logs these visitors come to my site and leave immediately.

Visitors from ask.com have a good conversion rate.

I don't have any clues about the others.