As you know, as part of the promotion for this blog, I’ve started using the SiteMatch feature of Google Adwords to buy ad space on a few sites. Here’s an update on how those ads are doing.
| Site | Impressions | Clicks | CTR | Avg. CPM | Cost |
| StevePavlina.com | 63,744 | 222 | 0.34% | $1.26 | $80.37 |
| PlentyOfFish.com | 61,438 | 95 | 0.15% | $0.34 | $20.69 |
| ProBlogger.net | 1,228 | 10 | 0.81% | $1.47 | $1.80 |
| Webmaster-Talk.com | 1,498 | 4 | 0.26% | $1.76 | $2.64 |
| Total | 127,908 | 331 | 0.26% | $0.83 | $105.50 |
So far I have spent $105.50 to get 331 visitors, or 31.9 cents per visitor. In order to analyze the numbers you will need the help of Google Analytics. Many webmasters use Analytics but few know that Analytics can be tied to Adwords.
Looking at the Adwords Analytics results showed me that advertising on Plenty Of Fish, while cheap, is worthless. Visitors came to the front page, then left. The best performing site (and the most expensive) is Webmaster Talk. A visitor viewed an average of 4.2 pages. ProBlogger followed this with an average 2.92 page views per visitor. Steve Pavlina did 2.33 page views per visitor. All three sites did better than the organic Google search of 2.11 page views per visitor. However, an organic Google visitor doesn’t cost any money.
I am not getting much impressions on ProBlogger or Webmaster Talk because my bid of $2 CPM isn’t high enough to have my ads shown that often. In order to increase the impression, I would need to raise my bid.
I cut off Plenty of Fish after the first day. I am going to let the ads run on the remaining sites for the rest of the month. Then I’ll decided if I need to do anymore cutting. My current impression is the traffic I am getting from Steve Pavlina, ProBlogger, and Webmaster Talk is high quality. The question is, are they sticking around? If you came to this blog from an Google ad, it would be great if you can leave a comment and let me know.