A Cautionary Tale re Google AdWords.
The system appears to be optimized for people selling goods of interest to millions of people, to huge marketers no matter what they are selling, but not to tiny businesspeople trying to mine narrow niches like equation editors. By targeting campaigns and not keywords, big advertisers can use any keywords they wish regardless of the relevance simply because they exist in a much larger corpus. Because keywords are treated by Google not individually but in the context of the whole campaign and these companies receive so many clicks overall, none of their keywords are likely to perform poorly using this algorithm. The result is that no matter how inappropriate or even offensive, those words will also be cheap to buy. And because these keywords have performed "well," their "history" is then updated with regard to the campaign of the big advertiser, effectively blocking out small advertisers who can't compete with the massive click rates of big companies.
This matches my experience. You may recall that I've bought ads (6 at the moment) here and also have a campaign with AdWords [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=254593|I've bid on] to show the "Got LRPD?" ad. I'm going to end both campaigns on May 31.
How's it turned out so far? Not so hot, IMO.
IWeThey Site Campaign
Active $1.00 / day limit 33 clicks 18,184 impressions 0.18% CTR - $1.56 Ave. CPM $28.42 total cost
AdWords Campaign
Active $1.00 / day limit 67 click 219,437 impressions 0.03% CTR $0.99 Ave. CPC - $66.24 total cost
CTR = Click Through Ratio (i.e. Clicks/Impressions)
Impression = Display of the ad on a web page.
CPC = Cost Per Click (for an AdWords ad)
CPM = Cost Per Thousand Impressions (for a Site ad)
The site campaign began on April 27, the AdWords on May 2. I've adjusted the budget over time (e.g. the AdWords had a $5/day limit and a $5/click bid for about a couple of weeks).
What have I learned? AdWords for this site are very expensive because the Campaign is so small. ($5 - $10/click expensive to have a chance of the terms showing up in Search.) As Cringely says, AdWords seems to be designed to maximize revenue for Google. It's not designed to enable small, specialized sites to have reasonably priced targeted advertising.
The AdWords campaign is mysterious. It's not really clear where the ads go. For example, at a bid of $1/click, my AdWords ad won't show up in a Google Search. At $5/click, it showed up in a Search and was clicked on 5 times. The other 62 clicks showed up in "Content" pages, but I have no indication which AdWords triggered the display of the ad.
I may be wrong, but I think we've had at most 4 new user names registered in the last month or so. It' not clear whether that's the result of the AdWords ads or something else. Since the latest users haven't posted anything yet, it's not clear how they found us.
Bottom line: Google's AdWords program for ads that point to this site does not seem to be an effective, inexpensive way to build our user base. I have no idea what might work better, but there does seem to be a business opportunity for someone who can figure out how to deliver effective ads for small Internet sites.
Admin: Are you receiving any meaningful cash from Google for the impressions and clicks? I get billed once a month, so my next payment will be ~ mid-June. After that, I'll suspend my Google ads (probably for a long time). I might restart the Site ads if it helps increase the cost of outside ads (but I doubt that Google's algorithm would be affected).
I think it's been an interesting exercise. I hope it helped Z a little.
Cheers,
Scott.