Hi, I'm trying to bring people to my site with adwords, and then make at least that money back with adsense. My first question is, is there a way of telling which adwords keywords generated the adsense revenue? I'm guessing using google analytics but it's a beast I haven't tamed yet!! My second question.... any other advice of any kind would be very welcome!! Thanks!
Generally arbitrage is the quickest way to a) throw money away b) get both your adwords and adsense accounts barred. My advice would be - unless you got on this train 5 or so years ago,don't do it.
Thanks for your advice. Please can you explain to me exactly why it would get me banned?? I'm not planning on doing *anything* that is against adwords or adsense policy. I'm just trying to optimise a system that works. My site is not purely to get people in for the sake of clicks out. I have good content, and it offers a valuable service. But I expect that most of the site's income is going to be from adsense. Which means that adsense will be subsidising the majority of the incoming traffic, or better yet, paying for it outright. The users of my site get a largely free service, but I need a way of getting people to pass through it. As I see it, there are two approaches I could take, with maybe a happy medium in the middle somewhere: 1) Struggle to get free visitors by organic means. 2) Have a larger flow of people in, and out, with adsense covering adwords costs. While approach 1 would *probably* yield higher quality visitors, approach 2 is much more likely to bring a greater combined value of visitors, even if the average visitor is of lower quality as far as the strict relevance of my site. By using the adwords/adsense approach to bring in more visitors, I would be hoping to attract potentially curious visitors, rather than people specifically looking for what my site offers. I will not be using adwords to deceive people into clicking to my site thinking it's something else. Nor would I be tricking users into clicking on adsense adverts without them being interested in the offering in the ads. I don't understand why what I'm hoping to do isn't a part of normal optimisation? Many sites use adsense, and no doubt a large proportion of them use adwords. Surely it's natural to optimise how the two interract?
Google don't have an automatic ban on sites with adsense using adwords, it's more grey and fuzzy than that. They 'discourage' arbitrage - if it's obvious when a google employee does a check on your site that it has a use and function other then to carry adsesne ads, it may not be a problem - but it's an entirely subjective decision that someone else is going to be making, they've never set down the guidelines as to exactly how they are going to judge it - http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66238 The first sign that you are being penalised for arbitrage is that they will try to price you out of continuing - if your quality score is consistently low, and the cpc keeps rising - give up quick before they hand out a harsher penalty. If that doesn't happen, then they are not considering what you are doing as arbitrage.