Final disclosure for this campaign.
I thought people had forgotten about this post and moved on but people have been asking about the final outcome of this test so here are the results and what happened afterward.
Total revenue:$31.79
total adwords cost:$8.56
profit:$23.23
Yup, my Adsense CTR and profits sucked. It definitely wasn't one of my best trials. Still, I think that low number is skewed by the WF visitors going through to see the page raising the page view count. I also asked people not to click on ads to throw the profit off. My best campaigns are in the 33% to 80% range and revenues and profits are much higher. However, there are a few things different about this campaign than others. The obvious big difference was that is was public! I know WF some members took the keyword list, content, template and pretty much duplicated my campaign. Who knows how many lurkers did the same. That must have some affect on the campaign. That's fine by me, it was an open learning experience for everyone.
Google frowns upon releasing impressions, clicks, CTR and page ecpm data but I said it was full disclosure so here it is.
The second thing about this campaign was that I didn't do any tweaking to the ads or content during the 30 day test to improve clickthroughs. I got lazy and distracted with other projects and just left it.
What might interest you is what I did afterwards. Before I started the test I had no idea whether the forex market was oversaturated or not. From the keywords and avgCPC data in Keyword Country and this test I'm guessing it is not.
So after the 30 days was over I registered a forex domain name, set up a web site on my virtual server account, paid $12 for a newly released PLR forex article pack. I jumped on it, posted all the articles, linked, social bookmarked and pinged to get them Google indexed before the other people posted the articles to beat the Google duplicated content filter. I'm happy to say it worked. My articles are all indexed and not in supplemental. I've added older PLR articles to pad the content but those pages will likely hit supplemental.
Now after about a week, I'm getting natural search traffic clicking on Adsense without having to pay Adwords. I will have some affiliate offers tossed in there soon and will put in an RSS feed mixed with PLR articles or other content.
In some ways I'm kind of glad this didn't go huge because this is more of what you will see from a typical campaign, other than the full disclosure part. Most tests will be duds and then you will hit a big one unexpectedly. More importantly I've found arbi to be a great test marketing strategy while making money from it. I find the more tests I do the more niches I find to capitalize on in other ways whether Adsense pays me or not.
I hope some of you find this informative and useful. Feedback is appreciated.
And so it goes. I wish you success on your marketing efforts.
