For the monthly check club: Do you rely on natural traffic?

I relied on natural traffic (searches from Google and others, links from related sites, etc) for my first year with Adsense. This made income in the hundreds but always seemed to be drifting downward. I then started buying traffic and things got to be much more controlled; spend more make more, spend less make less. Currently, I rely on paid traffic (7search, Adwords, etc) for most of my Adsense and other affiliate income. My cost and income vary less than 5%.

I read posts constantly about how the last Google, Yahoo, or MSN update killed someone's business. So my question for the community is can you rely on natural traffic if you want a stable flow of traffic and stable income?

 

Getting alot of search traffic is difficult because there are tons of sites competing or tops spots.

 

You make some good points. I agree that publishers shouldn't bet their future on organic rankings. However, making money from adsense with adwords is challenging (at best) for most people. I would guess that it is a downright losing proposition for the majority people who try it.

For content sites, relying on PPC traffic may be just as risky as relying on organic traffic. Most people, including myself, think that PPC advertising will become more expensive over the coming years. What happens if your average cost per click rises from $.07 to $.21 because of increased competition? What if all the major companies raise their minimum CPC to $.20, but there are so many publishers around, that even the most high-paying keywords don't average more than $.40?

I agree with your overall feeling of "don't put all your eggs in one basket". However, it seems like you are advising people not to put all their eggs in basket A, while you are putting all your eggs in basket B.

 

ot but does entering the monthly check club get you more benefits? like faster support, personal manager, etc.? are they less likely to ban? stuff like that?

 

SharpSEO,
It may sound like I am suggesting that all my eggs are in one basket but there is also natural traffic and I do craft my pages so they look good to a visitor and great to the Googlebot. I also don't rely only on top tier PPC but also use lower tier like 7search and GoClick. I also get links from other sites in the niche.

Regarding prices going up, it's fine if the bids go up as long as there is a spread between the top bids and lower bids that get some clickthroughs. If top bid is $1 and I can get some traffic at 0.10, I don't mind going up to 0.20 if the top side goes up to $2.00. Also, a competitive keyword could have a shrinking spread but I could be bidding on a less competitive word while displaying ads from more competitive terms. "Mortgage" might go up a lot while "California 40 year mortgage" is still low.

dzcap,
The people that get banned aren't in the monthly check club. The banned usually end up admitting that they were getting 7 clicks a day and "only a few" were ones that they were clicking themselves. They also use the word "cuz" and include "no apparent reason" early in their first post. One more thing, mom's name was on their Adsense account.

 

A monthly check would be nice, but then again I don't take this AdSense stuff too seriously. If I did I wouldn't be wasting my time doing the kind of web work I do. But wasting my time is what I've chosen to do, and as such, I rely on natural traffic. If Google one day decided to take my stuff out of its index, I'd get a fraction of the visitors.

For anyone who is more ambitious than I am, it's advisable to do the opposite of what I'm doing. Get some paid traffic, SEO your site, etc.

I'll say this, though. In the few months I've been doing AdSense, the natural traffic approach has been relatively consistent. Time will tell if that keeps up.

 

Natural traffic for me, tell us more about buying traffic, where do you go through?

 

I'd especially be interested in how you make buying visitors by PPC efficient when you only use AdSense (and some other affiliate programs) to generate revenue.

Assuming you pay 0.10$ per visitor and have an AdSense CTR of 10%, which means 1 in 10 visitors will click your ad, this click would need to pay at least $1 to be effective. And both, a 10% CTR and keywords paying $1/click, is quite hard to archieve I would imagine...

 

Is it realistic to pay 10 cents per visitor?

Edited: My entire post was way off, so I scrapped the whole thing.

 

It highly depends on your eCPM. If your eCPM is high enough, there is sense to buy inbound traffic.

Paying 0.10$ PPC means that you pay 100$ for 1000 visitors. If your average visitor browses 10 pages on your site, then it means that you have 10K page impressions and you should have at least 10$ eCPM just to pay off the incoming traffic.

If your average page impressions * your eCPM is more them 1000*PPC then there is much sense for you to buy inbound traffic. Because with each 1000 visitors you will earn more and more money.

 

By the numbers, it doesnt seem to make sense to pay for Adwords to earn Adsense, but I think the difference is that a person who clicks an (Adword) ad to get to your site is more likely to click an ad to leave it. You need to consider the type of visitor you get from Adwords to understand how it can work

 

Good morning everybody,

How much do you need to be earning before it's worth joining the club?

I'm averaging earning $20 a day at the moment from Adsense. With a very high CTR (over 20%), but low CPC (averaged around 13 cents per click last month). Is this income enough to start reinvesting in paid traffic? I don't want to start spending more than I'm earning.

Thanks,

fcmisc.

 

If you up an Adwords campaign and you can choose how much you want to spend per day advertising. If you are already making $20/day with out advertising you could at least afford $5.00 to get you started. I have found that for the campaigns that I run my maximum ammount is never reached.

For example I have a daily Adwords budget of $20.00 and on average only spend $7.00 but bring in anywhere from $20-$40 per day. Not a bad return I guess.

 

A question about paying for page views.
If I have a real, physical product for sale, and I set up a page advertising it, and then pay .01 or .02 for people to look at that page, is it okay to have an AS ad on the page?
I'm not paying them to click the ad, if they do it's just an added benefit, right?

 

Yes that would be fine. I have adsense running like that on my site http://www.macsupport.ca/sales.html. I have adsense running on the bottom of the page. And I also have an adwords campaign running that point to the site from time to time.

 

Do you find that you do best in adwords to adsense in the search network, content network, or both.

I think that users are less likely to come in from the content network and click on an adsense ad again. But you make a good point that these are different types of users.

I'm running a test with just the search network for a small period of time, and then I'll try just the content, and then both.

 

While I have no experience of adwords (yet!), I won't be using the content network for my ads. All the scare stories of fraud incline me to target my visitors from the search engines, and to filter geographically as well.

How many people have turned off the network ads?

 

Far more then those who tested the conversions of them first, most likely.

Pete

 

I'm testing now, will have a good report in about 45 days or so.

 

Another question: Where do you actually send the visitors via PPC? Just to the index page? Or some specific page?

I thought about creating a special index page with several well placed ads, an introduction and a menu or something like that... do you think that's worthwile or would convert better?