A couple of days ago I interviewed someone (a fellow Canadian, as it turns out, but that was accidental...) who is doing AdSense arbitrage full-time. AdSense arbitrage refers to the art of sending cheap traffic bought via AdWords to carefully written and designed pages and earnings money from AdSense ads on those pages. It's a tricky art to master and an easy way to lose money. If this interests you, here's the interview: The Reality of AdSense Arbitrage I also did a review of the product he's using, but it was very interesting to hear from someone who's actually doing it in real life. He spends a LOT of time on it, which I think is not unusual. Definitely not for everyone. If arbitrage interests you, it's clear that you need a good keyword tool to help you with the drudgery of finding keywords, volumes and pricing. The tool of choice seems to be Keyword Elite, although I also use AdSenseAccelerator. Are there any other commercial tools that you'd recommend to my readers? (I've been doing a series on arbitrage in my blog.) I know all about the free tools from Overture and Google, but you need more than what they offer.
Looks like a good read - i'm gunna read it later tonight.. I recently had my own Adwords failure (money down the toilet) - maybe this will help me with my next try..
You have to monitor AdWords costs and AdSense earnings very closely to make money. It's definitely not a "set and forget" kind of scenario, because things change all the time. Daily monitoring is definitely required. The technique described in the book I reviewed depends on obtaining cheap traffic from the content network and not paying more than $0.05 per click. You let the campaign run until you have 100 clicks and then see if you're making money or not. If not, you shut the campaign down and move to a different one. So the most you lose is $5 per test. Which isn't bad, I think, because it's very easy to lose a lot more with AdWords! Very sensible advice...
Yah, well you should'a told me that LAST month! I was paying $3-$4 (yeah DOLLARS) per click. I figured it would be worth it because the page i was sending them to had affiliate links that pay $80 per conversion.. I guess I should learn to crawl before I try to run a marathon...
Hey, I feel your pain, although I've never priced ads that high... It's amazing what a good landing page that closely matches the ad text for the initial ad in the group and the set of keywords can do for your AdWords prices, though. Not too long ago I created a campaign for something to send traffic to a product page. Google told me I had to bid $11 per click (!) to activate the search network. Screw that, I said to myself. So I put together a nice landing page on a new site with good navigation, a sitemap, etc. and created a new ad group with the same ads and keywords... minimum bid was now $0.45. The way to succeed is to build your own landing pages to get a decent quality score and to have compelling ads. Bid fairly high at the beginning to get a good spot in the ad auction. If you get a good CTR you can start lowering your bid price and still maintain your position. But you may lose money at first until you can lower your bids. Definitely not for the fainthearted, I'll say that much....
That's some great info. I just started today, actually. I can't find much information on this technique but apparently I had been doing it for a while and I didn't even know! I've been sending clickthroughs to affiliate links for quite some time! I like the AdSense method better though.. not so much worry involved.
The key is to keep a careful eye on your ad spending vs. your earnings and to cut your losses before you spend too much. That's what Michael Plante recommends in his arbitrage book -- stop when you've spent $5 and see where you're at. It's like using stop loss orders in the stock market. Of course, his method is using the content network for traffic. $5 is a low value for tests involving the search network. The key is to choose a dollar amount you're comfortable losing and being ruthless about the campaign analysis.
This is excellent, great knowledge, I don't think I would have the skill to master this but I guess if I practiced this day and night I would. +rep
Thanks for sharing this info. Unless one finds (sometimes the hard way) what type of sites/campaigns will give you the 2:1 and 3:1 ratios, its a difficult proposition to make money, and takes alot of work.
I agree, this IS one of the best posts in a while. The technique Eric Giguere explains sheds some light onto the AdWords-AdSense relationship.
Thanks Eric for this VERY informative thread. There was a comment left at the end of the article that talks about "keyword grouping". Can you explain more about this?