AdWords Experiment

I recently received a voucher for $100 from Google Adwords.  At first I thought that I would just toss it, but then I figured ‘What the hey?’  I’ve set up a couple mailing lists using AWeber and what better opportunity to feed a little traffic into one of them.

The Experiment

So, I decided to give it a try.  I set up a new mailing list on the Electronic Fortune Cookie site just before I got the voucher so I chose that as the venue for this experiment.  I’d also done some tweaking to the site to encourage visitors to stick around more.

Setup

I signed up for the Google Adwords and found that there is a $10 account activation fee.  The brochure I’d received in the mail said that this would be taken out of the $100, but the site didn’t allow that.  I had to sign up with a credit card.  On top of that, the minimum charge on a card is $20 so my free experiment has ended up costing me $20.

Next, I created the Campaign.  I only created one ad and set up about 10 keywords for it.  Set a maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) of $0.25 and a daily limit of $15.00 and let’s see what happens!

Tweaking

Initially, I let the ad go out internationally.  This kept the CPC low which meant lots of clicks for the $15 daily limit.  However, the limit was reached before the European and North American audiences were awake at their computers.  So half way through the experiment I limited the scope to North America, the Caribbean and Western Europe.  The CPC was a little higher but I was getting more exposure in the Western Hemisphere.

Results

When all was said and done (well, there is still $5.01 in the account — so a few more clicks could come in today) I received about 1,200 new visitors to the Electronic Fortune Cookie in a week — visitors from over 100 countries!  That’s pretty exciting.  I had some AdSense income (about $1.40), 12 signups for the Newsletter (the first issue went out last Saturday to 6 of them, the next issue comes out this Saturday) and a total cost of $20.

Conclusions

I’m glad that I didn’t have to pay for all the clicks.  I don’t think that I got $120 worth of value from this experiment, but I do believe that $20 was well spent.  I’ve learned a lot and generated some traffic.  Now I expect to see the traffic die off quite a bit, but hopefully there are some of the visitors who will be back and the overall effect will be an increase, both in visits to the site and newsletter signups.

Time will tell!

P.S.  Stay tuned for some posts on AWeber and a newsletter coming out for Ramblings.  I’m actually looking at moving the Internet section Ramblings to it’s own separate blog soon.

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Tags: AdWords, AWeber, email list, experiment, keywords, traffic