AdWords and a Real Estate Sponsor

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today's first sponsor is a service directory for people buying homes in the United States. They provide local quotes on home appraisal and pest inspections, as well as a closing cost calculator. It seems odd that I'd attract such a sponsor, since I've never posted about real estate before, but a posting job's a job.

Maybe part of the reason I'm attracting such sponsorships is that I'm now on AdWords, and am telling prospective sponsors so. Yes, you heard right: Google offered me a free trial coupon for AdWords, so starting last night, I've been trying to use it to help Life User reach its full potential as an engaging, widely-read and financially successful blog.

 To monetize the new traffic, I chose my review articles of the best Manowar and Machinae Supremacy songs as the landing pages for my text ads, since those posts still have Amazon widgets specifically tailored to them. To ensure visitors can actually read my reviews and buy the songs, I've chosen to limit the targeting to English-speaking adults in the US. Because Blogger still has some issues displaying on cell phones, I chose not to target phones.

Even with those restrictions, they've managed to show my ads over 48,000 times in about 24 hours! That figure drives home how huge Google is, much more effectively than market cap, usage share, revenue or employee headcount ever could. What's surprising, though, is that only about 1,000 of these impressions were in Google search results. Another 8,000 are with "search partners" (apparently this includes parked domains), and the rest are from "content" (which I assume means other AdSense sites).

I've had 14 clicks for CAD$2.60 of the trial credit, a cost per click of $0.19. (Compare to the US$0.35 per click I've averaged to date on AdSense, after Google takes its unspecified cut.) I'll be interested to see how the clickthrough rates — currently very low — improve as AdWords' algorithms gain experience with Life User.

Until then, happy house shopping!

AdWords and a Real Estate Sponsor