Web Design

Using Adwords to Drive Adsense traffic

The short answer is YES, you can use adwords to generate traffic.

However, you really do have to know what you are doing or else you can lose a great deal of money.

Here is the process you must go through if you want to be sure you are making a profit rather than a loss. I learned these rules during a diploma course in direct marketing and found the principles mapped directly onto the adsense marketing environment.

A word of caution. I have something like 2,000 pages currently running adsense. Only 12 of these are profitable enough to cover the cost of adwords and still give me a return on my investment.

If you do not follow the system below you will most likely loose money. i can say this because I lost loads before I discovered the hidden maths that allows me to only spend adwords money where I will get an adsense profit.

Maths? Yes, it comes down to mathematics. Adwords is marketing and marketing is as much about figures than fancy words or cool graphics.

Here, then is my method of making adwords drive adsense profitably.

Create an adsense channel for each page on your site. Adsense currently only allows you to create 200 channels so if you have more than 200 pages be sure to create channels for the pages you think will be profitable. Without this you cannot even begin to know whether you are making a profit or a loss.

Secondly, wait. Do not even consider advertising a page that has had less than 100 adsense clicks in the last 6 months. The reason for this is that at low click thru rates you cannot trust the eCPM figure, which will play a key role in your profitability calculations.

So, having waited a few weeks, you have a page that has had at least a few thousand adsense impressions and some adsense clicks. Now you want to know if you can make extra money by placing an adwords ad out there to drive traffic to your page.

The great thing about adwords is we only pay per click and therefore we know in advance how much our campaigns will cost. As long as our profit is higher than our costs, it is worth running a campaign.

However, this is where most people make their big (and expensive) mistake. They assume that the eCPM figure is their estimated profit figure. At its most basic an eCPM above $50 SHOULD make a profit if you are paying 4 cents per click.

The big secret is that you have to work out the statistical significance of the eCPM and calculate a lower 'safety' figure.

WHAT? Ok, that probably sounds like greek to you, and it sounded like greek to me too, before I was taken through it. Nonethe less, if you want to make a profit from adwords and adsense you must calulate the statistical significance of the eCPM.

Statistical significance is a measure of how accurate an estimated figure is going to be.

The eCPM is an estimate of how much money you will probably make from a thousand clicks. The estimate is based on the money you have already made from the adsense click you have already received. However, if you have only had a few clicks then how confident are you that the estimate is correct?

If you have had thousands of ad views then the chances are that the eCPM is realisitc, but if you have had only a few dozen or a few hundred clicks, then you really shouldn't be confident.

But exactly how confident can you be?

Luckily there is a formula which tells you EXACTLY how confident you can be in your eCPM figure.

Sadly it isn't an easy formula to understand...

Don't panic. You need a web page that does the calculation for you and just tells you the results you need and how to use them.

Here is a link to a page that does exactly that.

Adwords calculator