Google AdWords Eating Up My Beer Money



Well, that experiment was just not going to last very long. It costs a lot of money to run AdWords; clicks are freaking expensive! I really kind of assumed the whole thing would be a bit less harsh on the checking account.

Since setting a keyword based on my name is not exactly the most popular search term in the world it 'only' costs about fifteen cents for someone to click to come to my website.

The cost of a click appears to be related to the popularity of the keyword phrases. This causes the Google software to go into some kind of a 'bidding war' based on budget to decide who's ad gets placed.

Also, Jeff made a note in the comments section that the Google AdSense terms of service say you can't talk about the vast sums of money you are earning (enough to purchase entire six packs of beer) on your site. I don't know if AdWords has the same restriction but if they object they can stop charging my credit card.

Here are the results after running AdWords for only about ten hours or so.

Total number of impressions: 47,410. I set up keyword searches for three sites. The first was this blog that had keywords like my name or Freemason related items. It had 35 clicks with a conversion rate of only 0.08% or one click for every 1,119 times the ad was shown.

I set up another one for my programming website. This site has free source code and used keywords like 'C++ source' and 'code snippets'. It got 6,384 impressions, with a conversion rate of 0.20 percent or 491 impressions per click.

Finally, later in the day, I realized I actualy had something I needed to advertise which is my property I am trying to sell in the Lake of the Ozarks.

I was only able to make 1,842 impressions for my ad and received 14 clicks; which works out to one click for every 131 impressions; by far the best results.

The problem was the cost. When I first set up AdWords this morning it said I could 'set any budget I wanted', so I set like five dollars. Then it immediately said that wasn't enough money to receive hardly any traffic at all. Apparently they have a formula which computes how much you are willing to 'pay for a click' based on your monthly budget. If your budget is low, then only a very small percentage of search results will show your ad.

Given this recommendation I set my budget to $50. Next I went to work setting up my keywords to draw traffic in. However, after setting up my keywords, it quickly told me many of them were 'inactive'. I clicked on the help and it suggested they were 'inactive' because my budget was too low and, since these were more popular keywords, I just wasn't willing to poney up enough money to draw that traffic.

So, in the spirit of research, I set my budget to be $10,000 a month. As soon as I did this all of my 'inactive' keywords became active and I started getting more impressions and clicks. However, this was all at a higher cost.

Trying to compete with real-estate ads for lakefront property was the biggest challenge. After I bumped up my budget I started getting some good results. Unfortunately, it cost me a dollar every time someone clicked on a link!

How qualfiied is this traffic? I'm skeptical, but willing to keep the show running for a while.

For now I have disabled the searches for my coding website and for this blog and I am only going to enable the hits for the property I am trying to sell.

This past few months I bought a new car, did some home improvements, and paid for a two week European vacation for three. I ran up 30k in debt really fast that way. Now, debt is a relative term. I have money tied up in this property and, were I to sell it, then as if waving a magic wand I would immediately transform from 'being in debt' to being flush with cash.

I go back and forth as to whether or not I really want to sell the property right away. However, debt just annoys the heck out of me and I would rather have it paid off. I'm now completely certain that I will never use this property for reason I originally bought it.

I bought the property at a time when I felt absolutely no ties to my community and before I had joined Freemasonry. Now, I can't imagine leaving my home lodge and friends behind. Sure, I would find a nice country lodge out by our lake property, but it wouldn't be the same thing. Afterall, I already live on a lake and even though it is small I'm still way ahead of the game compared to most people. In the evening I can ride my golf cart down a short path and hop right onto my own boat, watch the sunset, and come home for dinner. True, I can't drive my boat for hours and hours but, then again, who could afford the gas? Somehow I think I can live with a small lake afterall.

So, here is the breakdown from my brief AdWords experiment of having a $10,000 budget earmarked.

Ozarks Property : 14 clicks, 1,842 impressions, cost per click $0.94 for a total of $13.11
Code Suppository: 13 clicks, 6,384 impressions, cost per click $0.39, for a total of $5.05
John Ratcliff's Blog: 35 clicks, 39,184 impressions. cost per click $0.51, for a total of $17.93

The grand total for the day, $36.09. That's a piece of change to satify my curiosity.

I do plan to leave the Ozarks Property on AdWords for the next month as I believe this might develop a real lead.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I tried using adwords for 3 months for my jewelry website and my tshirt site. I started out at 30.00 a month and it kept making things inactive, so I had to raise it, and it would go well for awhile, but then suddenly I would have to raise it again! I was getting oodles of clicks, but no sales, and because I also have stat counter on my site I could see where they were coming from, and a majority of them seemed to come from spam sites, so I started wandering if these were real clicks. After 3 months I think I got 1 sale from adwords, and so finally I shut it down.
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