Testing out Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter
I have around $500 worth of Microsoft Adcenter coupons so I figured I would give them a try for one of my sites. I set it up for the 2nd highest traffic site (Internweb.com), because it has the best click-thru ratio of any of my sites on Adsense, roughly 3.5%. The trick use your Adcenter clicks to drive traffic to your site and then hopefully the visitors will click on your Adsense ads. I was pretty skeptical that it was going to work. To get good search engine positioning, you pick various keywords, set up a text ad and the amounts you will pay for each click. The minimum is 5 cents. I tried that for a day and got nothing from it, not even any ad impressions at all. Plus I had to deal with some cryptic error messages about how my ads weren’t approved and it was generally not that easy to use the Adcenter site. The next day I upped my bids after doing some research on what the bids are for a few of my keywords, such as “internship search”, “fall internship”, “internships”, etc. The range I was at for my bids was from 25 cents up to 70 cents. It’s too early to tell if it’s working or not since I’ve only gotten a few clicks so far. I should know more early next week since the Internweb.com traffic goes down like clockwork on the weekends.
Inspired by setting up Adcenter, I decided to try Google Adwords as well. I wasn’t able to find a coupon and since I am just in test mode here, I set my daily budget at a meager $5 a day. It was the same drill as Adcenter, setting up keywords and bids, etc. It seems as though the Adwords stats are a day behind so I have no results to report yet as I set it up today. Adwords was a little easier to deal with than Adcenter.
I should have some results up in the next couple of days. I would really like to find some success stories to share about buying traffic for your site.
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Update: This never really panned out.
Google AdWords - I burned through the AdWords budget in a few days and didn’t really see much of a traffic increase or a revenue boost. My conclusion is that for my limited one-site experiment, it cost more than it produced. FAIL.
Microsoft Adcenter - my hosting provider gave me a bunch of coupons to use for this, so it isn’t costing me anything. I used one $50 coupon and didn’t see much of a traffic increase. I plan to use all my other coupons, but the portion of the host control panel to retrieve the coupons is not working and I haven’t had the time to bug the host about it.