I'm still poor. In fact poorer than I was a week ago but sooo much wiser. Here are the numbers for my first week (please don't laugh too loudly as I am a sensitive guy)
Impressions: 17,076
Clicks: 105
Cost: $5.14
Conversions: 1
Revenue: $0
Nothing to write home about that's for sure. As I started to wrap my head around how the whole adSense thing works I realized that my initial approach was very wrong. I was going way to broad on all 3 levels: campaign, keywords and ad groups. I paused that campaign and began a new one with a specific target and a number of different ad groups, fewer keywords, higher CPC bids and more ads. The idea is to compare the performance of various ads within a group to try and determine the kinds of things that trigger clicks/conversions. So far that hasn't yielded diddly since some of the ads are still under review (haven't figured out why yet). To date I am $15 off of my starting point but still have more than that available from promos so I'm not worried but I realize I have a lot to learn still before I can make this portion of my venture profitable.
Another realization that I came to was that this coin has two sides. All of these ads that people are buying need to show on sites and the owners of those sites make a few bones every time someone clicks. This is of course not news to anyone, especially me, but I sometimes get stuck with blinders on. I get stuck thinking that in order to drive enough traffic to a site I need to create compelling content and a great user experience which requires a lot of effort, hardware, software, time and the like. My recent epiphany was that all I really need is a cheap way to serve up HTML files (S3), access to some reasonably relevant content (WWW), a way to merge the two (Codegen) and a good site map. Once I get a handle on the affiliate angle (it's personal now!), I think I'll try my hand at the other side.
I still have a number of things to try. I'm no where close to done yet. My first goal is to get a CTR north of 2% and to convert another 2% of those which should put me somewhere around $8 in revenue per 100 clicks and my break even around $.08 per click, which is pretty low but would at least put me at a level where I think I could make adjustments and identify patterns quicker.
TTFN
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