I have probably spent over $200k on PPC. The rules are always changing and Google never really tells you exactly what is going on if your campaigns are stopped. There are many sites which appeal to the same audience but are not competitive. Someone who has a site selling dog collars must joint venture with a site selling dog food. Their customers both have dogs but they sell different non competing products. Google is the middleman. Google finds websites and gets them to put up Adsense ads. Then they split the profits. Why not go direct? Most of the traffic from my Google campaigns is from the content network not the search. All Google is doing is running ads on websites. Why not do that yourself and cut a better deal? As for the volume of traffic this is definitely tricky. If I put lots of keywords that are related to my site I get slapped if the exact keywords are not on my landing page even though they are synonyms. If I use just the exact keywords Google usually delivers very little traffic. If I raise my bids to crazy levels it is simply too expensive. It is not straight forward hence all the forums discussing this topic.

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