I've just finished an experiment with Adwords on one of my sites which has resulted in my clicks increasing from $0.05 - $0.30 per click to $1.50- $2.75 per click. That's almost a 10 times increase in earnings! Here's how I did it. Using a free £50 Adwords voucher I used some keywords to drive traffic to one of my internal pages. The page was already getting some good organic traffic so I knew it was a popular term. Over a period of a month I averaged a 5-10% CTR for the Adwords campaign. Pretty good results even if I say so myself. The idea was to make some sales directly from my site. This worked to an extent but there was a much more interesting side effect. What happened was that Google seemed to apply Adsense smart pricing in reverse for the duration of the campaign. I've never heard of this phenomenom before but as long as the Adwords campaign was running my Adsense clicks were a minimum of $1 ranging up to nearly $3 per click. As soon as the campaign stopped, my clicks dropped back down to their usual $0.20 -$0.30 per click. Now before anyone starts mentioning arbitrage and how it will get your site banned, this is not about arbitrage. It seems to be a by product of having a very targeted Adwords campaign with a high CTR. I'd be very interested if anyone has experienced this phenomenon before.
did you block your site on adsense, because you could actually be serving your own adwords ads for your site, on your site.
Thanks for your comments Dollar James but FYI my ad campaign was for a very specific product that only exists on one page of my site. The increase in Adsense EPC was sitewide - ie every page on my site experienced a massive increase in earnings ( as observed via Google Analytics Adsense tracking)- you can LOL if you want, but it's nothing to do with my ads being served on my own site.
Hi Michael T, Thanks for your comments, however do you have any proof for your statement? I have the analytics and the money in my Adsense account to prove that Adwords does indeed affect Adsense earnings.