Tips on Using Google Adwords to get Traffic to Increase Adsense Income.

I have been doing something a little different for me the last few weeks and thought I would share it. I have seen people ask about using adwords to get traffic to a primarily adsense type site and I had tried that months ago without much success. But if you get the right site and the right adwords ad it can work.

Here is what you need to make it work I think:

1. A site that people will want to come back to. For whatever reason they bookmark the site or just remember the name. ( Or perhaps you can set up the a newsletter capture page and send out something to get them to come back.)

2. Steady use of the adwords ad. If it is working at all and you do get the repeat visitors then you should see a steady improvement on the cost of the adwords ad and the revenue of the adsense.

For example, if on the first day you try this and you spend $10 and you get $10.50 from adsense, then you may be tempted to say "That's not going to work. 50 cents? Big deal." and stop the ad. But if you keep it going and you see a steady increase in profit margin then you should keep the ad going. That means people are coming back. Eventually you may want to stop the ad but why as long as your traffic and margin keeps going up?

3. Having an affiliate product or your own product to sell on the site also. This may help you determine whether or not to keep trying to use adwords to get traffic to the site.

This particular site where I got over 1000 clicks yesterday was doing OK for months at a couple hundred clicks. But I tried an inexpensive adwords campaign and the amount I spend on the campaign has remained the same as the amount of traffic has continued to increase to the point now that it is 5 times more than what it was.

I am trying this on a few other sites as well, including one site that is a pure sales site for a niche industry, reselling hundreds of products from shareasale. This one is a little different because I am spending more on the adwords than what I am making on adsense and the sales of the products combined. However I am willing to do that because I see a decrease in the difference and I can see it reaching the point where I will be making more because this site is well made, has a good domain name that people should remember and I want to brand the site.

So is using adwords, or any ppc advertising, a worthwhile way to make money from your adsense sites? I would say yes, but you need to pay attention, watch the figures and test the ads. If it doesn't work out, try another site though. Many just won't work this way. And this probably won't work with the average adsense type site with just articles, feeds and adsense.

Tim

ps...I am thinking of using a geo targeted script so that I can also use YPN ads on this site and seeing what happens. For those who don't use YPN ads the interesting part is you can choose the type of ad for each site if you want. So instead of having contexual ads that may not pay much you can get say insurance or loan ads that may pay 10 times as much. This is something you need to test as well. For example, if this site that gets 1000 clicks from Google contexual ads and makes $100 a day then changes to YPN and gets only
150 clicks but makes $160 a day then you will probably want to switch over to YPN.

However you need to have a script to make the ads geo targeted because yahoo wants the ads only showing in the USA now. Plus something to consider is that the 1000 adsense clicks perday will probably be a much more consistant figure than the 160 YPN clicks per day. Again, you just need to pay attention and test.