Does Adsense Arbitrage Really Work?
Note: How to Make an AdSense Arbitrage Machine is another article I have published on this weblog about Adsense Arbitrage. I suggest you to read that article too because it is explained in detail how to run an Adsense Arbitrage system.
I see several exaggerating ads on Google about making money through Adsense Arbitrage. Some of them claim that you can make over $1500/day. You may see such an ads on this page too because I have monetized this weblog with Google Adsense. Google Suggest says that “Adsense Arbitrage”, as the search term, is used for 442,000 times in Google.
So obviously thousands of people have heard about it and want to know more or try it and see if it makes real money or not. Unfortunately crooks are always ready to abuse such opportunities and cheat people. Even if Adsense Arbitrage works, making more than $1500/day which is claimed in the ads is nothing but a dirty trick to sell some useless e-books to people or collecting their emails.
I ordered one of them last night and was forwarded to the download page after the payment. They had everything to download but what I had paid for it. I asked the ClickBank to refund my money.
I have been using both the Google AdWords and Adsense for many years. I have made so much money through the Google Adsense and have received some gifts from Google. To be honest with you, I have never tried this - so called - Adsense Arbitrage but I am 100% sure that it does NOT work and you will not make any profit through it. I am not going to explain what the Adsense Arbitrage is but I just need to define it.
What is Adsense Arbitrage?
Adsense Arbitrage is based on paying for a low price keyword in an pay per click system like AdWords, Yahoo or MSN AdCenter and driving the visitors to a page which is monetized with Google Adsense that has higher payout because of the keywords/phrases that are used on that page.
Let’s say you have created a page that is optimized for “web hosting” as the key phrase and so Google Adsense should display the “web hosting” related ads on it. Now you should drive users who look for web hosting products and services to this page through advertising on the Google AdWords. To make any profit, you have to pay much less than what you will get through the clicks that the users will make on the Adsense ads. So if you use the “web hosting” as the key phrase in your AdWords campaign, you will never make any profit because Google does not pay you 100% of the money it charges the advertisers. It means if you pay $3 per click and then users come to the page and click on the ads, you will get paid $1.5 if lucky.
These so called Adsense Arbitrage experts say that you have to look for other key phrases that are cheaper to bid but still related to same keyword - which is the “web hosting” in our example. According to Overture Bid Tool, the maximum bid on the “web hosting” is $3.99 and if you want to find other key phrases that are related to web hosting but are cheaper to bid, you should add some words to it. For example “web hosting reviews” or “web hosting providers comparison” that are much cheaper. Even if you do it, you will not make any profit or at least reasonable profit because of some problems:
- Google does not display the high paying ads on all websites. An ad that makes one dollar on one website, can make $0.10 on another one. Can you be sure that your website is the one that Google displays the high paying ads on it?Nobody knows what the exact percentage of the money that Google pays you for having the Adsense on your websites is. It does not have just a one sentence rule that for example says “We pay you 50% per click.”. It is like the Google algorithm for ranking of the websites. Nobody knows what criteria Google has exactly. They say their system checks over 1000 factors to rank websites on their search result page. Their system also checks tens of different factors to calculate the commission you should receive for the Adsense clicks.
- Are you sure that all of the users who click on your AdWords ads and come to your website are those who are looking for web hosting services to buy? Unfortunately when you place an ad on the pay per click search engines, you will receive several clicks from your competitors and not from the potential customers. I have read several e-books about Google AdWords and all of them encourage their readers to click on the same AdWords ads, related to the products or services they want to advertise on the AdWords, to know their competitors and learn how they advertise. People buy and read these e-books and unfortunately many of the clicks your ads will receive are from these users who want to see what their competitors sell.When these users come to your website they do not pay any attention to the Adsense ads you have posted on your website because they want to know what you sell. That’s why the conversion rate of the pay per click advertising and also the Page CTR and Page eCPM of Adsense become decreased from time to time.
- Do all the other users click on the ads? Definitely not. Of course you can ask them to do that and you will make lots of money for a few days BUT Google will ban you from the Adsense permanently and you will not even receive the money you had already earned.
- Many of the AdWords advertisers bid on the content clicks less than the search clicks because they believe the content traffic has a low quality. “web hosting” is an expensive key phrase but it does not have the same price on your website. It is expensive on the Google search result page.
- There are some other bitter facts about pay per click advertising and receiving the fraud clicks. Google fights against fraud clicks strongly but you can still receive loads of them everyday.
You may say if advertising on the AdWords and other pay per click search engines is so disastrous and dark, why thousands of people still do it? I don’t say that advertising on the AdWords (or maybe other pay per click systems) is not good and you will lose more than what you earn. In contrast, I want to say if you have a good and well designed website with attractive products, you will make lots of profit through AdWords. What I am emphasizing on, is that you can not make any profit through the combination of AdWords and Adsense.
So what should you do?
- Can you bid on some very cheap keywords in your AdWords ads and then drive visitors to a page which is optimized for a high paying keyword?
No; it is against Google terms of use. You can not drive Google users to pages that are not related to what they have searched on Google. This is a kind of abusing and cheating and Google will ban you definitely.
|
Google AdWords is the most expensive pay per click search engine because it has the highest competition. Naturally Google Adsense is the highest paying contextual advertising system. So you can advertise on a cheaper pay per click like MSN AdCenter and drive visitors to the pages that are monetized with Google Adsense. This is the only way that may make some profit but to make it reasonable, you have to create hundreds of optimized web pages and also hundreds of ad campaigns. I guess it can make some profits but I am not sure because all the problems I mentioned above can be true in this case too: You will receive much more fraud clicks from the MSN; not all of the user click on the ads and … .
On the other hand, AdWords is the highest traffic pay per click program and others like the MSN AdCenter have not reasonable traffic for many of the keywords. So you have will to …
1- … find thousands of high paying keywords.
2- … find thousands of low bidding keywords related to those high paying keywords you have already found.
3- … create hundreds of pages optimized with the high paying keywords.
4- … create hundreds of ad campaigns with the low bidding keywords.
5- … keep the track of the traffic and the revenue you make through the channels you use in your Adsense units.
6- … calculate and see if it makes any profit or not.
Do you have time to do that? I don’t know about you but I will not try it.
Very nice article. Adsense arbitrage is garbage. I believe that some people with extensive ad campaigns and high CTR can make it using adsense arbitrage, but I have been dealing with internet marketing and adsense as well as adwords for over two years and I wouldnt even want to try it. By the time you make any descent income utilizing “adsense arbitrage”, you may as well have just created an ethical website such as the one you have created here. Keep up the good work.
Very nice points in the article but I’ve got to disagree that Arbitrage is all that bad, you see its gotten a bad name because of the influx of users abusing the crappy business model, I do arbitrage all the time and even since the recent Google crack down on arbi I’ve never ever had a problem, I even know people who are clearing $10K a month doing Arbitrage and they have not been warned or attacked by Google.
Its the fact that people started getting lazy and creating a one page site with no real content on it and tossing up ads in optimal places, well this caught on with a whole wack of people cause it was just super easy to do and that alone is a crappy model to follow and its no wonder the big players treating the game like that got their accounts suspended.
Its the fact that Google has always wanted to provide the users with reliable, up to date, unique content, Google is the one that was making more money from Arbitrage then anyone else but its the fact that there advertisers were loosing money and refused to loose their service, they started loosing more money from big advertisers leaving the Adwords service so they had to take swift action and that they did.
But its not a dangerous or bad game if your doing it in the correct manner, you’ve got to increase the quality of your business model and provide real quality to the end user that way Google doesn’t have a problem, your not breaking any TOS by doing so and the advertisers are happy because they are getting more conversions from their PPC campaigns.
There are two sides to every story and I think everyone jumps all over the bad side of this one because that is the most dominate one but it agrivates me that people have given it a shady name just because the flow of people abused the system to the point of causing trouble for Google.
My final advice to this long comment is if you really want to learn, first learn what Google wants to provide and learn how to please the advertisers that are paying for that click, if you can do that then you’ll never ever have a problem because you’ve got the correct business model and are not taking the easy way out.
Hi Aequitas,
Thanks a lot about your informative comment. Could you please explain a little about your Adsense Arbitrage strategy? How do you do it?
Best regards,
Vahid
Hi again,
Please also read the other article I have written about Adsense Arbitrage:
http://www.weboma.com/how-to-make-an-adsense-arbitrage-machine/
the site is very informative about adsense arbitrage, well, i am still new to adsense but i would like to know for hand how to check and control the malady on my site ..www.friendysteph.blogspot.com
i am also new to Google adsense, and want to know whetehr google will really pay for my website http://www.codeinstant.com
the thing is, with 1 to 3% CTR, you need 100 clicks to reach your site before you can make 1 profit, and the lowest bidding words will cost you 5 cents, so you are paying 5 dollars for 100 hits
I’ve been doing adsense arbitrage for about a year now, and it definitelly works for me.
I think you are doing a diservice to whomever reads this, and or trust what you have to say
on account it may not work for you, but it definitelly is and has worked for me. although with the
new adsense TOS the person has to read TOS carefully, or one may lose ones adsense account.
as far as im concerned, mum is the word.