One of my little distractions this past couple of weeks has been to dabble into the world of click arbitrage, ie: advertising via Google Adwords to doorway pages that lead to a CPA affiliate site. I’ve not put an awful lot of effort into it, but I have run a couple of ads to see what would happen. Suffice to say I’ve lost money, but not a lot (under $50). I spent some more time today looking at the results, seeing why some things were working and why others weren’t. My biggest mistake: allowing too many of the ads to run on the content (ie Adsense) network. It’s scary, but whilst there was a lot more clicks in from sites running Adsense, the results just don’t add up. Search results are ten, maybe twenty times more likely to result in an action (and therefore payment to me) as opposed to content result. My new tweak: I’ve doubled the maximum bid for a spot in search to hopefully get my ads up a bit higher (they were averaging spot 9), and I’ve cut my spend on the content network to 10 cents. I’ll see how the results work out, but I’m thinking that I’ll either cut the bid on the content network to 2c (or what ever the minimum is) or see if I can exclude my adds from it all together in the next couple of days. I’m by no means Mr. Experience when it comes to buying ads from Adwords, but I can even more so now understand the theory of those stating that Adsense is dead: when your looking for a CPA return from your ad, the content network simply isn’t a good buy.
One last tweak: I’ve now time limited the ads as well to times I think would be key times for people looking for the service.
Of course if you’re interested in giving Adwords a shot, click on the button (affiliate link). I think I get a couple of dollars for each sign up, it will all go towards buying more ads I suspect 🙂
