I have a goofy little app I wrote as me-ware, but published in the vane hope that somebody else might find it useful. It’s just a simple dice roller for use in a role playing game I’m running online. I released it, but never promoted it anywhere, and predictably it received no traffic apart from myself.

Now it happens that I was sent two vouchers for free credit on Google AdWords. AdWords works by me submitting ads to Google which they run wherever it is that Google runs ads (which is just about everywhere). The ads are free to place, but whenever somebody clicks on an ad, it costs me money.

So I tried setting up an account with the credit I’d been sent. In the end, it added up to about $180 worth of ads. You can set a limit on how much to send per day, so I set the limit at $4 a day, so I got a bit over a months worth of advertising.

Once I started running the ads, there was a 1:1 increase in traffic compared to clicks on my ads. AdWords was working! I was getting traffic. Unfortunately once the credit ran out, the ads stopped, and my traffic went back to it’s normal level, which is to say no traffic at all

The yellow line in the graph represents new visitors and as you can see, nearly all of my traffic is new, which means that nobody is coming back

Oh well. Nibble some humble pie. It really is me-ware after all. It’s curious how running the ads can make it look so good, yet none of it mattered since nobody came back. $180 dollars worth of credit spent on worthless traffic. I’m glad I didn’t spend $180 of my own hard earned.

Parrallel to the AdWords experiment, I was playing around with AdSense. AdSense is where you can let Google run its ads on your own site and get paid whenever somebody else clicks on those ads. I was curious to see if traffic flow through my site translated into income through advertising.

During the month of August, while the AdWords ads were running, I made a grand total of $1.37 at an average of 12 cents per click. So it was costing me $4 a day to run ads directing traffic to my site. There was about 10 visits per day as a result of those ads. So it was costing me ~40 cents per click to bring traffic to my site, from which I made 12 cents per click on ads when they were on my site. Or to look at cost over time, AdWords was costing me $4 a day, while I was making 4 and a half cents per day from AdSense. It was costing me 100 times more than I was making.

The economics of this are sadly clear to me. AdWords just isn’t worth it (for my site). The only way for this to justify itself would be for word of mouth growth in traffic, and for return visits to increase. But based on figures I was seeing through Google Analytics, I’d need in excess of 1000 visitors a day just to break even from ad revenue (if I continued to pay $4 a day on AdWords).

Lessons learned:

• AdWords isn’t worth it for me.
• AdSense needs a lot of work tweaking it so it delivers relevent ads. I think this is one area that let me down. The ads Google was serving were rediculous for my content. They seemed to be getting more clues from my domain name (bluestoneIT) and were serving ads for paving stones rather that ads related to my content (table top gaming). Better SEO on my part would probably help this

I’ll continue to develop that site since it remains useful to me as long as I’m running the game, but the AdWords experiment is clearly a failure.