People always say Adwords is an excellent way of bringing in targetted traffic to get returns but what if your site's income comes from Adsense or other ads? Is it still going to be worth it even with the minimal CPC? I think, unlikely. Derek
This has been discussed a lot here, check the last time someone posted this question here (me): http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=46791 My guess is: no Yes, Adwords is a good way to bring traffic to your site but it costs a lot of money and you need to control if it worths. Adsense just pay you some pennys for tons impressions and Adwords will charge you some bucks for these same clicks.
ServerUnion! You have a link to a blog that describes buying and reselling cars and you can't see the parallel with doing the same with Google traffic??? I can bid $0.05 or less for a visitor and then have a fraction of those visitors click on ads (or buy my software, subscribe to my email list, apply for a free trade journal, or read my content) at $0.30 to over $1 and I am not chasing my tail. The key is finding a segment where you have good bids but not too many (if top bid is $1 and I can be in the top ten for 0.05, you can do well) . You do have to watch it as keyword prices can cool off.
I've been playing at this for a few weeks now, and I've found a set of keywords to advertise for at 5-15 cents per click which are appropriate to drive traffic to my site where I get 30 to 80 or so cents for clicks on my site with different but related keywords. I'm not so far impressed with the conversion rate. I am making money, but so far I haven't been able to say that it has been noteworthy. I'm going to keep at it for a while anyway while I learn more about copywriting and Adwords nuances for different, future purposes. Then I'll re-evaluate.
(or buy my software, subscribe to my email list, apply for a free trade journal, or read my content) [/QUOTE] You are gaining more then adsense aren't you? There may be ways of doing so, but there are many other ways to do cush without buying the traffic. I think a better term would be "chasing pennies" My thoughts are such. You have a site about dogs, which you have to pay .10 per a visitor. 10% click on your adsense ads about dogs which is bid at .10, of which you get say .05. 100 visitors cost $10 which give you a revenue of 50 cents with this model. let us know how you get around this model? Thanks...
ServerUnion, the way around this is do the legwork to find related, but cheaper keywords to advertise for. ie, "designer widgets" may run on your site and bring you 80 cents per click, but you can buy ads for "Imported french widget" for, like 10 cents. If your niche is right, your page is compelling enough (toward garnering ad clicks) and your ad copy is tweaked to pre-qualify likely buyers, you can get a real good CTR on your site. I've gotten this working on a few of my less popular sites. I get few visitors, but they are motivated and click at a high rate, thereby effectively doubling or tripling what they otherwise were making (without the adwords boost). True, I wouldn't have built these sites from scratch with this business model in mind, but I have found it (so far) not bad at increasing the payout on these piddly sites. I do think that any success I've had has been blind luck, but I bet someone skilled could do it deliberately, and not be "chasing pennies".