Google Adsense/Adwords - Is It Even Worth It Anymore?

[mono]

I have to put in an agree vote... This i s kinda funny I used adwords AND adsense for a time. When I stopped driving traffic to my site with adwords my adsense revenue dropped precipitously, even though adwords really wasn't bringing THAT much additional traffic into the site. That tells me that the main people who were clicking my adsense ads (giving me money) are the same ones who came into my site by clicking my adwords ad on some other side (taking my money and splitting it between google and the publisher). I ditched adwords because it was
costing more than it was bringing in in both sales and adsense. I seem to be selling about the same with or without adwords, so that tells me the adwords clickers were tire kickers. I appreciated their clicks to adsense but it was a loss when you rack it up beside adwords.

It shouldn't be an issue that most adsense sites are crap. If they are truly crap no one goes to them so no one will click your adword so you won't be out anything.

I guess the novelty wore off google ads jut like it did with banner ads in 1996. People would click google ads because they respected google and the buzz lasted for several years. But I think the surfers just have herd immunity to google ads now.

[dann]

This one got me, had to reply.
Now that Google secretly scores ads and landing pages, I would suspect you are paying more for adwords and receiving less for non-cents. You see they are charging more for what is perceived as non generating clicks that are not making them money. Non-clicks upset advertisers. Yep, people want something for their money they spend on adwords not just clicks.

For instance you have a high traffic blog and your users click on ads cause they like 'em or they want to support your, submit their email address or download a virus, for your effort you may get a quarter.

In this case you will get more than cents, but if you are a lowly blogger that same ad might pay you a nickel.

At the same time they are rewarding the fat spenders with high CTR scores with lower rates and placing them higher in the GSEP (google search engine pollution) rank.

It's time to not rely on Google for anything, you must have a Backup plan.
Since Google has dicouraged buying links, you really have no other choice but to buy advertising from them if that iws what you want, but if you use your imagination a little, do some reaserch and cross the tees and dot the eyes you can thrive without Google.

My advise to anyone with a mind, there are plenty of ways to make money online, Google just made it a whole lot tougher. Get rid of that googlesyndication.com paying pennies per click and make something that attracts people to you and your products and opinion.

It pays my bills. Bye Google, nice knowin' ya before you became evil.
Dann

[purplepaisley]

Likewise here, I feel your frustration. Myself and an associate have both had massive drops in adsense revenue the last few months, after previous months of steady increases beforehand. A large portion of the ads recently are irrelevant rubbish, like adsense spam, they can afford to bid high because no-one would click on them anyway. New ones come in almost as fast we can block their urls.

I'm currently considering using Commission Junction's Ebay affiliation for related auction keywords, I should search to see if anyone here has had any success with it.

I'll be watching this thread for other alternatives for two community oriented support sites that we prefer to keep subscription free.

[dann]

Gotta agree with you there purplepaisley, the only problem is the tens of millions of spywareblaster users will never get to the landing page. Same goes for bfast, cj, doubleclick, clickbank and the list goes on, add to that ad-block and your audience shrinks big time.

I guess my point is you can't just slap a web page up and expect the money to come rolling in, it takes a whole lot more effort than copy/paste.

[Filmo]

We use Adwords to generate leads, but long ago selected the option to prevent any of the ads from being served on the 'affiliate' sites. For our business we found that to be an absolute waste of money.

We DO generate lots of revenue from people buying our services when they search for them directly on Google, but never a dime from people reading blogs, etc vaguely related to our material. In fact by placing our Ads in the affiliate network we felt like we were more subject to click-fraud than we were on just the main google search site.

[CyberCrone]

No real need for yet another 'amen' to negative comments about adwords, but if each vote is counted 8=], I don't get sales for near as much as the adwords cost me and am about to quit, too.

Toni

[webrc]

Great post (and statistics) from ArthurNYC. I feel unless you get a ton of traffic Adsense isn't going to give you a significant income. Sure an extra $500 a month or even year is definitely welcome but you can't live off of it.

Adsense was good income 3-4 years ago but not anymore. I also feel we'll see the same deterioration of SEO in the next few years.

Tom
Bizak.com

[RegDCP]

I have to fall in line with the majority.
I have several sites that maintain a steady traffic flow and while click throughs remain fairly consistent, payments have dropped considerably.

Reg

[susannice]

yes, definitely Adsense/Adwords come up with more and more crap every day. But what is the alternative? I have not found anybody who would pay me more than them as advettiser and also i do not know of anybody that delivers better traffic than them for the same cost. any suggestions are appreciated.

sesile.com

[snowflakegirl]

Early 2007 I signed up with Vibrant Media (Intellitxt) and have been extremely happy with them. Your site must have high traffic to qualify, but it's worth applying to them. My Intellitxt payouts now exceed Adsense even though my Adsense impressions have skyrocketed they reduced payment - which forced me to look elsewhere for income - and I'm glad I did. Diversify!

Here's the Vibrant Media application process (text copied from their website).

How do I Join?

To join the program and get your Referral Awards simply send an email with Vibrant Ads Referral as the subject line to bdusa@vibrantmedia.com if in the US or bduk@vibrantmedia.com outside the US.

Please include the following information:

The name of the site(s) you wish to refer
The contact details of the person we should get in touch with
Your site(s) name
Your contact details
In addition, let us know if we can share your name along with your success using Vibrant Ads!

--------

Another new program is ADSDAQ ADSDAQ - A New Advertising Exchange from ContextWeb
They don't have a referral program yet so this referral to you is my treat!
I signed up at the end of November and so far they have easily made up the difference of income that I have lost from falling Adsense funds.


Hope this helps someone