Ok, I have had my adwords back up for a day. My click through rate has not changed yet but this is cool. I usually do $12.00 a day in adwords. When I cut back I went to $6.00 a day. That is when my CTR dropped. I put it back to $12.00 today wich means I spent $6 more than yesterday but I also earned about $13 more than I was doing when my CTR dropped. So if you do the math. I spent $6 and gained $13. That is 117% profit. So I am now wondering if I bumped it up to like $50 a day in adwords. Would I earn about $108 more than I am now making about $58 of that profit. Not forgetting that the point of my site is an online store. I may even produce some sales out of the increased traffic. Anyone think this theory is realistic?
New info. Alright, after checking my stats again, looks like I will be finishing the day with about $67. Thats up from the last few days by about $15-$17 meaning $9-$11 of that is profit. My click through rate has not gone up because I have added adsence to my new forum and the CTR for that is very very low even though the impressions are ok. So taking that into consideration, it looks like my CTR is back to normal plus I have profited from putting adwords back on my site. So if this stays like this wich I believe it will, then it is definitely worth running adwords to get visitors to your site because there is a higher chance that these visitors will leave your site through an ad. I am seriously considering setting my daily limit to $50 just for tomorrow just to see what would happen.
FTEGal - You have figured out the "secret" which is experimentation. It isn't about CTR but instead conversion amounts. As you have correctly stated what matters is for x dollars spent you made x+y dollars actual profit. Keep us updated as it seems to bolster my earlier statement that natural SERPS are not a replacement for an AdWords campaign but instead a compliment. Good Luck!
I find the extra money I earn from adsense doesn't make up for the money I spend on adwords to get the extra visitors to my site. It is a shame because I can get a lot of visitors from adsense for the minimum cost. I have found that having a keywordkeyword.com domain you can get 10-15% CTR on your adword ads. I guess people see my ad and know its what they want because of the domain name. The main problem I have with adwords is that because my site is a service that people use daily, they tend to do the same search in google each day and then look for my add, rather than remembering my domain or bookmarking my site. So I end up paying for them to visit my site every day. I guess others who are having sucess with this method use lower cost terms to direct visitors to a site that pays well via adsense. If you are paying the same as you earn you would need every visitor to leave via an adsense ad in order to just break even.
Well, it is nearly the end of the adsence day. 2:00 AM my time. Am I am so excited about what i have to report. Being a friday, I usually have a cruddy night. But I set my daily limit today to $20. In a regular friday I have been having it at $12 and that would result in about $53 day in adsence. So today I spent $8 more than I usually do for adwords, and my daily earnings are at $73 with another hour left to go. My CTR is back to being what it used to be. This earnings number is an all time high for me. That really excites me because it is a friday. I can't wait to see what a monday will look like. I have not has a record amount of impressions nor a record amount of clicks. It is totally my CTR that is driving this profit. Conclusion from todays experament. I spent an extra $8 and made $20 more than i usually do. That is 150% profit. It is hard to tell if any sales have resulted from this endeavor since people shop around when looking for the kind of stuff I sell. But the adsence earnings alone have made it worth while to run the adwords. I will repeat this experament for the next week and report my findings each night to see if it stays constant. Each day I will increase the amount of money I spend in adwords to see if adsence rises proportionately. I hope this post is useful to those of you out there considering starting an adwords account.
Well, it has been a while since I updated this thread and I wanted to tell everyone how things are going. Before reinstating my adwords account back to $12 from $6 a day, I was averaging about $60/day in adsence. Well, this week I bumped my adwords budget up to $30/day and I have had record day after record day. So far my best day has been $97. I have consistantly been in the $80's and $90 all week. My CTR is up and so is my CPM. I really believe that the more I pump into adwords, the more I get from adsence.
One nice thing you can do with Adwords is bid for a reasonable postion with a bid much lower than the top position. You will pay your price and Google will try to serve the highest eCPM ads. I have come across some that I can pay about 10% of what the top bidder is paying and I get visitors that click in through Adwords and back out again through Adsense. It is the game of buy low-sell high or arbitrage if you want to discuss it at business school.
FTEGal: Just curious: do you allow networked ads (i think that's what it's called... ads displayed on partners' sites in addition to google.com)? Everyone: as i play with pricing my keywords with adwords, google tells me what the number visitors per day i'll get given my keywords and the price per click i am willing to pay. have you guys found this number pretty accurate? am i right to say: the less you pay per click, the fewer number of ad views you'll and/or the lower your ad will appear within multi-ad unit blocks? thanks! james