5 replies to this topic

[GaryBradshaw]

I keep seeing sites in my market that are clearly built just for Adsense, however they advertise using Adwords. The ones I am thinking of are not even ranked in the top 50, do they are getting no real SERP traffic.

How do they make money? A cost per click for one term is like $1.50 and they likely make .40 cents for the click. This does not even make sense or am I missing something here.

And some of the sites I see are so clearly just Adsense sites it would seem Google could easily figure that out.

[Jill]

The ones I am thinking of are not even ranked in the top 50

For what? How do you know all the phrases that they might be showing up for?

[GaryBradshaw]

Ok, so it was a guess

But when I look at the copy I can kind of get a feel for what it should show up as.

The larger point of the post was that it does not seem to make sense, buying Adwords to sell Adsense?

[oneofthe3lions]

I see where u are coming from.. however do remember that they can set their maximum cost per click! they perhaps have it set at 5 or 10 cents and their average adsense click may make 30 cents.

[torka]

I've run across an ebook or two lately that purport to teach this technique. Apparently, the idea is to write the text to target high-value AdSense ads, while bidding on low-cost related AdWords terms. The site owner then pockets the difference between what they make on the AdSense clicks versus what they pay for the AdWords ads.

At least that's what the sales letter for the ebook seemed to be saying. Despite their breathlessly urgent copywriting, I can't say that I was actually inspired to purchase the book myself...

I would think that the real trick to this would be to write pages that convert to AdSense clicks at a high enough rate to make the whole scheme work. Too many people who click on the AdWords ad but don't click through to the AdSense ad and you're going to lose money, no matter how low-cost the AdWords phrase might have been. At least, that's how it appears to me.

--Torka

[Scottie]

I seem to remember hearing people refer to this practice as "click pimping" in December of last year.