Tuesday 9 February 2010

Does it work?

My primary e-mail address is with Gmail, or Googlemail as it’s known in the UK (legal issues or something stupid). One of this blog’s outlets is Blogger, which is owned by Google and on that version of the blog I run Adsense ads (I did have them on my website too but removed them). They don’t provide much in the way of income, but, I ain’t about to turn down free money.

Therefore, it was no surprise when Google sent me a voucher for free Adwords ads if I signed up. £75 worth. Ohh. Exciting.

So I opened an account and set up some ads. My budget is 50p a day, which should last me five months or so. Coolness.

To some extent it has worked. I’ve seen traffic to the website increase by between ten and twenty visits a day. And these visitors are being taken straight to my general e-books page or the individual books pages. Indeed, these pages are now the most viewed on the site (apart from the homepage) whereas before it was the free stories page.

Since I started running the ads in mid-January I’ve had three hundred clicks on the ads. That’s three hundred visits to my website that I almost certainly wouldn’t otherwise have had.

But here’s the question – how many of these three hundred extra visitors have actually clicked through and bought a book? And what would be a good ratio of visitors to sales? I’m not even considering a 100% ratio – although three hundred sales would be welcome. Hell, I’m not even expecting a 50%, 30% or 10% ratio. Honestly, if just 1% of these extra visitors have bought a book, it would have been worth while. After all, I’m still running the ads for free right now.

It’ll be a while before I find out what effect the ads have had since the sale figures I get have a two month delay, but I can tell you, I await January’s figures with interest.

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