AdWords Update

The Zope experiement has ended. Didn't take long, either. Yesterday, I bought $5.00 worth of ads on Google for the keyword "Zope". I ran this ad...

...and Google displayed it 442 times. I had 21 click throughs, which amounts to a 4.75% click-through rate. Pretty good, I'd have to say, especially for an ad that I put about 2 minutes of thought into.

While the 4.75% number is pretty good, It comes out to $0.23 per clickthrough. Google has a new pay-per-clickthrough program. I'm guessing that it costs a bit more than $0.23 a click. Let's see.

The new program allows you to choose how much you'll pay per clickthrough. That amount, multiplied by your clickthrough rate determines what position your ad will appear in.

Given this, I think it might make sense to bid $0.01 per clickthrough and let my high clickthrough rate (4.75%) bump up my scores. It's worth a try....

Looks like they're on to my scam:

Guess what? I don't think it makes sense to bid $1.14 a clickthrough. If I'd done that, I'd already have spent almost $24.

I guess this makes sense if you don't get many clickthroughs.