How To Mix AdWords™ With AdSense™

In order to take full advantage of reading this article, there are two conditions you need to fulfil. The first one is to own a real website, with well writen and well organized content. The second one is to know the basics about running an AdWords™ campaign.

When you run an AdWords™ — AdSense™ mixed campaign, you have one goal to achieve: earn more from AdSense™ than what you pay to AdWords™.

Let us start with the beginning:

What is AdSense™ and How it Works

Besides AdWords™, AdSense™ is the other major advertising program run by Google. Here are the basics:

You own a website. You subscribe to AdSense™. You get accepted into the program. Google's ads are displayed on your webpages. Everytime somebody clicks on an ad, Google pays you a certain amount of money. More on AdSenseHowTos.com, our sister site :)

How to Combine AdSense™ with AdWords™ Effectively

Theoretically, it is possible to gain more from AdSense™ than what you spend on advertising your content website with AdWords™.

Here is how:

Supposing you get traffic from AdWords™ for an average of 8 cents/click, you'll pay $80 for a thousand visitors. If the average visitor reads let's say 4 pages of your site, you'll get 4000 page impressions. As you did spend $80, the cost is $20 per 1000 impressions. If you get more than this from AdSense™ (let's say $35/1000 impressions), you make a profit ($60 for $80 spent, in this case).

However, in practice things are way more complex. There are a lot of variables you should be aware of:

  • getting large amounts of targeted traffic using AdWords™ for just a few cents per click is tricky
  • having those visitors browse more than one page of your site requires excellent content
  • getting $35 per a thousand impressions from AdSense™ is hard, too. Your site should be in a very competitive niche, and in this case it's almost impossible to get cheap traffic from AdWords™...:)

Our advice is not to try it. You'll probably waste your time. You can, however...

Use Adsense™ as an Extra-source of Money

Suppose you're already selling your blue gadgets through AdWords™. You can still use AdSense™ to gain some extra money. At least you could see it as a way to reduce your advertising costs.

If you decide to do this, here are a few things to pay attention to:

  • AdSense™ pays per click. Is it convenient for you?
  • Competitor ads. Set Adsense™ not to display your direct competitors ads on your site - that wouldn't be smart, would it?
  • Track results. If the overall performance of your mixed campaign is lower than the initial results you got with AdWords™, drop AdSense™.

More information about how to make money with Google Adsense™

Finally, let's talk about how you can use AdWords™ to start a business.