Keyword Elite AdSense Arbitrage Experiment (Part 7)
Again, please refer to the previous parts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.
Time For A New Niche?
Although the first couple of days of results are muddled because I screwed up the channel IDs, it looks like I'm losing money. Not a lot, obviously, because I'm only bidding $0.05 per click, and I haven't been running it for very long, but at this point I don't think it's a winner. I did play with the ad text and with the page itself (I've actually moved it to a different URL to make sure anyone reading this series wasn't tampering with the results) but so far I haven't seen a big difference in the earnings. It's still early, but I think I'll look for a different niche.
This is what makes arbitrage so hard to do, of course. It's not like the best niches are obvious to everyone, otherwise everyone would be doing the same thing.
Omigod, you mean I have to do work?
Analyzing the Bid Gaps
Still, let's do some further analysis to see why spyware removers wasn't a good choice. Remember, I was just following the vague steps described in the free report, which is basically a pre-sell for Keyword Elite, where I chose the keywords to focus on based on their search popularity, not really looking at much else.
But I have access to a more sophisticated (and, admittedly, more expensive) tool called AdSenseAccelerator. One of the features that it has that's missing from Keyword Elite is a way to do bid gap analysis. In other words, it lets me see how much advertisers are really bidding for specific keywords at different bidding positions. By looking at the bid gaps (the difference between successive bids) and how quickly the bids drop down into the sub-dollar range we can determine whether a given keyword is likely to make us money or not.
And remember, the bids you see listed for advertisers are what the advertisers pay for search network bids, not for content network bids, so you have to discount those values greatly to come up with reasonable values for AdSense pages. So a $0.20 bid price will just as likely give us only $0.03 per click. Or less! If we're paying $0.05 to get the traffic then we're losing money, especially since not all the visitors we send to the page will click an ad on the page.
But I won't do the analysis today, I have to get ready for a book launch tomorrow…
Sponsored Link: Last chance to buy Uncommon AdSense at a special pre-launch price…
Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. His goal is to get his AdSense blog into Matt Cutts' blogroll.
How Google Could Make Even More Money
Much as I think Keyword Elite is a powerful tool, I also think it's a very frustrating and non-intuitive keyword tool. And I hate the way I have to depend on Overture numbers to get search query numbers when it's Google I'm targeting. But Google doesn't give us the numbers we want, only supplying vague approximations via Google Suggest, Google Trends, etc.
If ever Google finds its revenue streams drying up, there's one easy way they could bring in a pile of cash, and that's by creating keyword tools that give outsiders insight into what's happening with the Google search engine. What are people querying for? How often are they querying? Those kinds of things. A lot of people would pay for that kind of data. I know I would.
Not that Google needs my advice on how to make money.
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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. His goal is to get his AdSense blog into Matt Cutts' blogroll.
Keyword Elite AdSense Arbitrage Experiment (Part 6)
Please refer to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 of this series before continuing.
Status Update
So the spyware removers arbitrage scenario has been live for a couple of days, and I think I've made a profit. I say I think because I put the wrong custom channel ID on the ads on the page, which means that my tracking for that page was mixed in with the tracing for a completely different site… Obviously I chose the wrong tracking ID from the drop-down list when I generated my code. Oops. So there's a lesson for you, even the guys who generally know what they're doing screw up from time to time!
That said, I think I need to both expand the set of keywords I'm targeting — I'll need to create new AdWords ad groups for that — and tweak the text of the page itself, as I'm not sure it lends itself to much clicking based on the traffic data I can see, even though I muddied the results with the wrong tracking ID.
This is the thing about arbitrage: it takes a lot of fiddling to get it right, and don't be surprised if things don't work at first. Especially because there are three things to play with:
- The keywords you're targeting — do they give you enough traffic? You need lots of traffic to make lots of money with AdSense, arbitrage or not…
- The ad text — is it appealing enough to be clickable?
- The article text — does it leave the user wanting more so that they'll click an ad instead of hitting the “back” button?
If you misfire on any of those, you can either lose money or not make any money at all. I'm going to play around with things and see if I can improve them. It doesn't help that we're flying blind a bit without the explicit details found in the AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging ebook.
And I'll make sure the tracking's right this time!
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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. His goal is to get his AdSense blog into Matt Cutts' blogroll.