Adwords Investment Drives Adsense Profit

Is this possible? Allowable?

[brownoatmeal]

Is it possible for one to promote a site with low CPC Adwords & make money from AdSense featured on that site from other advertisers who pay more per click? Even after the fractional split w/ Google?

Would something like this violate G TOS?

Has anyone done it?

Thoughts on its viability as a biz model?

Thanks,
B.O.

[Clark]

I've seen people do it. I'm sure G is secretly thrilled by it. But they can't say it out loud.

[Jenstar]

I don't believe it would violate the terms unless you are doing something fraudulent. And there are publishers who use Adwords to drive traffic.

[JuniorOptimizer]

It makes complete sense. If the nickle per click surfers exit on a higher priced ad, you can make some decent money.

[ganderla]

There are several threads on this subject. Here is one.

[webmasterworld.com ]

I do it for one of my sites and make decent money. But I am more into it for site recognition and repeat visitors.

[WallyBob]

I have just recently started using Adsense and because my sites are new and don't show well in the SE's I started playing iwth Adwords to see how visitors would respond to my site. (just to test) I planned on losing a dollar or two a day (I only used a few words with low click cost) and was surprised when I actually started making a dollar or two instead.

There's no question that I need to work on getting my sites recognized by the engines but I might as well make a few $'s while I'm working on it.

[Jon_King]

This has been going on quite a while. In some limited cases it can make you money but mostly, if the Adwords bid is low so is your Adsense payout and a high Adwords bid is risky. Play with it in your product area and see if it works.

[brownoatmeal]

Well, then, on paper, I think it would be safe to say, that if I had some special powers in the copy writing arena that delivered marvelously better CPC's than others on the same keyword using Ad-Words, then it could be a workable model...

[mike schmitz]

Harder than it sounds. You have many more elements working against you than for you. First you have to bid low and get a high CTR and CPC. You have to hope that Google's targeting doesn't suck on a given day or you are SOL. It does work for me - it just is a lot of work.

[Never_again]

IMHO, Jon_King and mike Schmitz have it right. There will always be exceptions, but in most cases you aren’t going to make money. Think about it. Lets assume
you can get a 5% CTR on your Adsense ads on your site. That means for every 100 visitors, five click an Adsense ad on your site. If your Adword CPC is $.05 to get a visitors to your site, your cost is $5.00/100 visitors. With a 5% Adsense CTR, your Adsense EPC is going to have to be $1.00 just to break even!

Again, I'm sure there are places and keywords where this could work for you, but as a general rule, most of the time it will not. The only way to know for sure is to give it a test – and then report back so we can all benefit.

[howiejs]

You have to watch this everyday. And then look at weekly trends to see what is working / loosing money. The issue is one week it can be great - and then an advertiser opts out of content or smart pricing hits - and the next week is bad . . .