Good sources of paid traffic that are allowed for Adsense?

adwords are too expensive for me

[pompousjohn]

Hi I have a page selling an affiliate product and so far the conversion rate seems to be somewhere near zero.

I placed some adsense on it and oddly enough for a product with conversion at or near zero the adsense ctr is around 30%.

Well, I am driving traffic to the page with adwords, so I guess people inclined to click a google ad once will click it twice about 1/3rd of the time, and that's no surprise, but the problem is I am losing alot of money since the adwords campaign is pretty expensive compared to the trickle that comes in from adsense.

If I lower my bid then traffic slows considerably and ROI does not increase, everything happens the same just alot more slowly.

So I am thinking about buyinbg some banner and text ads outside Adwords hoping to get some cheaper traffic, but if I get a huge amount of traffic all of a sudden I am worried Google might disable my account.

I don't think I am violating their TOS in any way but I have heard horror stories about this and was wondering what kind of paid traffic is "safe" to use with Adsense?

[greigmc]

My reply might be a bit off topic, but it sounds to me like you're asking the wrong question.

You're buying in traffic for an affilate product, but instead of buying the product people are clicking straight out on the first reasonable looking link they can find i.e. your AdSense banners.

In your position I would be taking a long hard look at the copy on the landing page and asking why is this not converting for me?

The problem of conversion can be broken down into three main areas:

1. Your Adwords are targetting the wrong people. I don't think this is the problem, because in that case people simply wouldn't be clicking on the banner.

2. The copy on the landing page isn't good enough or isn't targetted well enough at the people clicking on the banner.

3. The product is hard to purchase in some way.

2 and 3 can be tested quite easily.

For 3 just try to order the product, but put yourself in the place of the user. Does the site do something that puts you off the purchase, does it make it harder than your competitors?

2 is equally testable. Presumably you target more than one keyword with your adwords campaign. Create a second (a third, fourth...) landing page with different copy or differently targetted copy and use these test landing pages with some of your adwords. After a few days you'll know which ones convert the best. You can then use these as your main landing page. This, of course, is a cycle which you can repeat over and over again. And maybe then adwords won't seem quite so expensive.

[richardmasoner]

I strongly suspect you're pulling in people with misleading ad copy or they're landing on a page that's not relevant to what the clickers are searching for.

I was looking for a specialty product the other day, for example, and the first Ad on the SERP seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. I clicked on the advert and landed on a Flash entry page. Yuck, but I clicked to enter. After about 20 seconds of futility in searching for the product I gave up and went back to the SERP, where I found something more relevant in the organic results.

If you're selling green widgets, don't advertise for blue widgets. Don't try to cast a wide net if you don't have the product to back it up. Read up on maximizing conversions. Good luck.

[edited by: tedster at 7:03 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2006]
[edit reason] Thread moved from another forum [/edit]

[Matt Probert]

Try the banner exchange program 'showyoursite'. We find it far more cost effective than Adwords (it's a free program, but as we rely on advertising, showing an exchange banner means losing revenue from a paid banner).

Matt