I am wondering if anyone uses adwords to get traffic for their adsense sites. I have a wedding photographer index website which usually earns 40-60 cents per click. So I am wondering... what are the factors that determine cpc amounts in adsense. Does it matter how much the bids are for on the advertisers end? Does it matter where the click came from before my site? Would google "penalize" me for attracting hits to my site using adwords that were attracting adsense clicks?
they will not penalize anyone for doing that but I wouldn't recommend using adwords to drive traffic if you are not selling anything.
That's called bid arbitrage. If you somehow manage to earn a profit from your clicks than more power to you. Even a profit of $.05 is good. All you have to do is crank up the amount of keywords your using and your making money. Just don't spend more than you make ;P
Google may not, but you might find yourself blocked at the publisher level if you end up only paying them $0.01 to $0.02 per click, especially since it may be obvious that your ad is just to get clicks on your own ads