When PPC Arbitrage Goes Wrong (A Small Case Study)
Written by Pablo Palatnik on November 6, 2008
On election day, I decided to put up a single URL of my blog on Google using PPC to drive traffic which was really the reason for me to put it up and spend money, but I’ll explain. The post, had to do with the election and as a big follower of the election, I wanted to put something up online and get the peoples interest. I wrote a post that you will find in this blog about following the election in real-time which Google, Yahoo, etc had widgets to embed and I figured SOME people may not be able to watch it on TV and would maybe follow it online, and what cooler if they followed it on my blog, right? It’s an online marketing blog, but still, very few times do I divert to writing about others stuff.
So, I embedded the Google widget on my blog and as my readers know and have seen, I always keep a Google adsense block at the bottom of the post to “monetize” the pages. So, I figured, OK, if I spend money driving the taffic, I would probably get some back for it by Google Adsense and maybe even turn a profit.
I expected a lot of traffic since I was bidding on super-high volume searched keywords and bid very low. I thought I would get screwd with the quality score but surprisingly enough, I wasnt.
So, to quickly summarize what happened, I spent $20.00 to drive over 300 visits in 20 minutes and made $3.84 from adsense (im going to disneyworld!)
Two reasons why I didn’t turn that $20.00 into $30-$50 in 20 minutes.
1) My adsense blocks were at the very bottom at the page which was the LAST thing the visitors would look at when seeing the page.
2) Very irrelevant ads to the content in which the traffic was coming for. I was targeting election keywords meanwhile I was showing ads about NetFlix.
As I have 30 things going on at once, I knew the problems but again, I didnt put this up to make a profit, etc. I wanted to see how much traffic I could drive, how Google would react to my page with the keywords I bid, and maybe get some RSS sign-ups.
So, if you’re planning to put up a page using PPC to drive traffic and turn those ads to profits, make sure you’re placement is on point and the ads are as relevant as they possibly could be which there are certainly ways to make that happen, especially if you have the right content.
Posted in: Online Marketing
