Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I track these AdSense ads through a separate channel. The channel has an excellent CTR of almost 20% on the average. I also found the average payout per click to be around $0.50. So the eCPM is almost $100. I suppose the visitors see the widgets on my site, and 20% of them who can't find what they are looking for, proceed to get them from the sites in the ads.
So, in effect, I now get back at least $2 for each $1 that I invest in this experiment (I say "at least", because today, for example, I have an amazing 400% ROI). This is in addition to the uncalculated benefit of some of those visitors surfing to others parts of my site or bookmarking it (in fact, from Google Analytics I see that these are some of the best visitors, viewing more pages than any other group and coming back most often).
I'm not sure how this all makes sense, but probably I'm "buying" a "bargain" targetted visitor from Google, that, 1/5th of the time I can "resell" to somebody else for 10 times the price, even after Google takes it's AdSense share.
I think that the AdWords --> AdSense connection is very much misunderstood right now and needs further investigation. All webmasters should try experimenting with AdWords and see if it makes a profit for them. I would imagine this technique could work even better if you use high-paying keywords (which I don't unfortunatelly).
I did the same thing. After my site gained some popularity I started using Adwords to bring more traffic to my site whose only revenue was coming from Adsense.
However, just when the adwords campaign was in its 5th day, one dreadful morning I received an email from adsense that my account is disable for fraud clicks/methods.
The first thing I did was to stop my Adwords campaign.
After few days of stopping adwords, google staff emailed me askign reasons why I stopped my campaign. I wrote them one liner, saying you get me back into adsense and I will start again.
So be careful, sometimes a spike in income may raise alarms.
Regards,
If you have a legitimate site, I see it as very hard to have a click through rate that is equal to your ad words traffic
That's what I think most experience with this method - ASA or somebody else from Google (in the AdWords forum or maybe one of the Google blogs) mentioned that AW can be a great way to generate traffic and interest in your site, however don't expect to make 100% of your money back.
If it was a serious problem for Google, they would make it quite clear that it was illegal (and considering how easy it would be for them to check AW and AS accounts against one another, as well as websites, it would be easy to spot).
As it is, the market eventually will catch up to you (unless you have an MFA site) and you'll be wasting money, and so that's probably why Google doesn't have a problem with it.
I have a theory that advertisers using adwords in this way are good at getting clicks thanks (in part) to eye catching copy. Many advertisers in my niche's ads are really boring!
The other point about the arbitrage trick is that you have to make sure you funnel your visitors to your advertisers. MFA's have the minimum amount of content (if any), frequently break the TOS by disabling the back button, and throw away the rules about number of links etc.etc. With a site that is content rich you are on a loser.
With my current campaign I've put in a low daily maximum, highish bid price and made the ad very enticing and that has worked well in getting cheapish clicks. With this campaign I'm publicising my new blog, and don't intend to make a profit on click throughs - so breaking even is achieving more than I set out to do on this occasion.
I have a question for webmasters who do this... If you see ads for a different MFA site showing, do you add the site to your filter?You should filter out MFAs anyways - part of the user experience is that they don't find crappy ads off of your site (whether it be misleading or MFAs or whatever), because many people associate the ads on your site with your site.
If you are doing what david_uk was talking about, where you are using AdWords to publicize a new website, this is especially true.
Using Adwords to pull somebody to your site, and then having them click on an ad that isn't relevant (such as to an MFA site), they are not going to have a good first impression of your site, and may not come back, and therefore you've wasted your money on AW.
Although there is no way to track such a statistic (Google maybe able to), if you use Adwords to draw people to your site, and if they come back in the future to visit your site, then it's definitely worth it - it doesn't necessarily matter whether they click on your AdSense or not - they may post about your site somewhere else, or email your site to other people they know, and all of the sudden you have more traffic coming in (not to mention helping with PR, etc.).
The first thing I did was to stop my Adwords campaign.
I find it hard to believe that Google thinks its own traffic could be fraudulent.
Actually, that could become a sale. I don't even think this is too much of a stretch. Say someone from the Phillipines is in America and is sick. He doesn't understand the US medical system. He contacts a friend from home who has lived in the US to help him locate a doctor. The friend sees the ad and clicks on it to get contact info for the person in the US. That ad converted in to a sale and was clicked by someone 8000 miles away. Why else would someone legitamately click on such an ad?
Like it or not, that's the premise behind smart pricing, and to judge from Google's success with the content network, it appears to be working.
It appears to be working because most publishers take Google's claims RE: smart pricing at face value. Extensive testing has proven that there is no real benefit from smart pricing to either publishers or advertisers. Conduct a few controlled tests of your own and you'll see what I mean.
Any advertiser benefits from smart pricing are perceived, not real. You might argue that it makes little difference, but in the end it certainly will.
Anyone who does this arbitrage is considered a scum sucking dweeb.
I lost my membership in the local country club when the members found out I was an adwords/adsense arbitrage person. Now I have to golf on the public links - yuck.
It makes much better sense to write original content and wait for the search engine gods to find you than to succumb to the arbitrage temptress (there you go humble.)
I had no idea until today that we were doing "arbitrage". But each month Google giveth Y and Google taketh X away. Each month we wonder if we spent 2X on advertising, would we double our Paypal revenue, would we double our Adsense revenue?
Thank Goooooood we have never had a month when X > Y.
If you have a website with a good review about the 'new blue widget' and you attract visitors with AW, they read your review and later click on an AS ad on your site about 'buy the new blue widget', I think this is win-win for all party's. So this situation is just business. It's like a consumer-magazine who makes publicity to buy their magazine, you read it and go to shop to buy something they had a review about.
I had no idea until today that we were doing "arbitrage". But each month Google giveth Y and Google taketh X away. Each month we wonder if we spent 2X on advertising, would we double our Paypal revenue, would we double our Adsense revenue?
Don't confuse yourself with the MFA sites that use AW. If you are providing real content and are just wanting to make people aware of your site, I would hardly call it "arbitrage".
I'm surprised you are able to maintain a positive income flow if you are using both AW and AS for the same site, month after month.
I measure my AW expenditure on a few things (that can be difficult to measure by):
- traffic after I stop using AW. Say I run AW for a week, I'll look at traffic in the weeks leading up to the AW campaign, and then at the weeks after the AW campaign. If it looks like I'm getting repeat visitors, or just an increase in traffic in general, then I'm happy.
- I also look at referrals for a few weeks after the AW campaign to see if there is a noticeable change.
- page views - as weird as it may sound, when I run an AW campaign, if it does well (i.e. increased traffic even after the end of the campaign), if my page views increase noticeably, then I'm happy. That means people are looking at the products or widget information.
If I see an increase in Adsense (which can and does happen), I feel that I've still wasted my money if pageviews and traffic are not up noticeably - I really don't want people clicking my ad and coming to my site and then turning around and clicking another ad and leaving right away, because they may not come back.
I will add this - I only use AW for keywords that I do not rank highly in (yet). Once I start to rank on the first page of Google and Yahoo, I drop that keyword from any ads I may do in the future, because otherwise I'm wasting money.
I know, I'm weird.
