Can adwords help me make money?

[dollarshort]

Heres my situation, I have several a news sites that have an average CTR of 18%, (due to with good ad positioning thanks to this board), my earnings per click is about 15-20 cents, if Im paying an average 3-4 cents per click I'm wondering if I can make a profit.
Any sugestions? Anyone else using adwords with sucess.

Thanks

[invisible]

Absolutely. For all my sites (100+) I buy traffic from adwords. You have a very good CTR and your CPC is quite good.

Why don't you put a budget of $50 into adwords and see how it goes. You might be plesantly surprised.

[anton23]

Probably you can make a small profit with adsense + adwords. Normally it ends even, so you have to use other ways of incresing your traffic. 20c CPC is BTW a good rate, so it is also good 18% CTR. If you increase your traffic don't expect that you will keep these good numbers.

[mzanzig]

It's an easy calculation:

Cost for advertising (in $)
divided by
Cost per click (in $)
=
Number of visitors to your site
x
CTR on ads on your site (in %)
=
Number of Clicks away from your site
x
Earning per click
=
Revenue generated from acquired visitors
minus
Cost for advertising
=
Profit (Loss if negative) for your site

Example for the details you provided:

1000.00$ spent for Adwords
divided by
0.05$ CPC
=
20000 visitors to your site
x
18% click-through-rate
=
3600 clicks away from your site
x
0.175$ average revenue per click
=
630.00$ earnings from Adsense
minus
1000.00$ cost for Adwords
=
-370.00$ Profit/Loss

So actually you would be losing money with this setup. Not considered here is the fact that you are gaining visitors (and potentially repeat visitors in the future), so your site might become more popular. But the plain financials do not look good IMO.

[anton23]

hello mzanzig,

you are calculating the adwords with 5, since the min. bid is 1c and he is paying 3-4c, I still thinks it will end up even. What normally is the case. So keep building traffic through other decent ways too.

[mzanzig]

Yo Anton, you are right - I was under the impression that the minimum CPC is $0.05 for Adword customers. I may be wrong. I wanted to clear up the question in general by providing the formula to the WW forum, so that anybody can actually do their own math. :-)

[dollarshort]

Thanks :)

[jomaxx]

If you have a site that people will realistically want to bookmark or link to or tell a friend about, what you're proposing could be worthwhile. If it's a more-or-less made-for-AdSense site, then I'd say it's a losing proposition.

[dollarshort]

Update, I gave it a shot, put a max of $10 per day, max bid .05 per click, got 79 clicks at .03 per click, funny thing my CTR shot up to almost 40% and EPC shot up to .30, could it be an statistical anomaly? I'll keep it going for a while. Another good thing, my ad got 1700 page views, free advertising..

Thanks mzanzig for the formula

Thanks Guys

[thegreatpretender]

I've been doing this since a year ago. Though it's like a roller coaster ride, I am very happy with the result. You just have to baby sit it. But definitely there's a money to be make using adword + adsense. In fact, I have discovered an excellent strategy using both adwords and adsense that make me happy everyday (but won't tell the secret, so please don't ask! Figure it by yourself.)