I’ve run several Adwords campaigns for clients over the years so when a new client told me she wanted her product advertised on websites with similar target markets I thought of running an Adsense campaign.
I set a relatively high daily total ($500) which I usually do for a regular Adwords campaign to make sure my add appears as much as possible. That was my first mistake.
My second mistake was trusting Google’s suggestions. I typed in about half a dozen key phrases related to sleep disorders in children and their suggestion tool came up with about 70 websites. My experience with Adwords has taught me to let the data tell you which words are money makers so I figured I should let the add run and see which sites paid off.
Less than 24 hours later I got an email that Google couldn’t process the payment to the credit card used so I logged in to look into it and in less than 24 hours they’d managed to rack up almost $400 of charges $370 of which came from a website where you create an online pet! Gee! No wonder why of the 1.3 million impressions there were only 810 clicks and no purchases! (9 of the other sites account for the other $30 and 60 of the sites Google suggested didn’t have one impression.)
Of course I immediately paused the campaign and put in a ticket to Support but in the last two weeks of back and forth all I get from them are instructions on how to use the system. I seriously doubt they’ve even read my emails to them.
Buh-lieve me! I will never use Adsense again and I plan to make it my mission to warn others about what a rip off it is.
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