Adwords Referrals from Google
I noticed something yesterday when I had logged into the adsense page at Google. They’ve now added “adwords” referrals. For those that don’t know – Adwords is the name for the program where you can advertise your site on google, or through their advertising network (such as this site for example.)
The deal seems to be that when someone spends $100 in advertising (within 90 days of signing up) from a referred click (and they’ve never been an adwords user before.)…. then the referring site get’s $20…. not bad. As for adwords itself….
Adwords is, of course, the text advertising that revived the concept of advertising online. The idea is that you bid for certain keywords that you want your ad to appear with. It’s a bit more complicated than just being the highest bidding advertisor though, because there is a weighting of how likely an ad is to be clicked (based on past history…), these two factors seem to control how high in the list of ads your text ad will show up. Frankly, it is a clever system. You can set budgets as to how much you want to spend and essentially you are paying for clicks, not for impressions.
So, in a sense you might say that you’re using adsense to “pay” for visits to your site. Which should encourage advertisors to choose their keywords and the copy of their text ad well so that they have the most relevant/interested visitors as possible. I have never tried adwords firsthand, although I keep telling myself when I have a day or so to sit down and play…. I may do it.
It seems as though the minimum is $5 per month (I’m not certain on that, working from memory….)
Well, as you can see – above is one of the ad examples….