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.