Last I posted I was driving traffic to my newly set up cooking games site.  That was almost a week ago, and a lot has happened since then.

I turned off my Google Adsense ad today after my budget ran out.  Below is the continuation of the results.

Day 4:  Adwords sent   71 clicks (still a $5.00 / day budget) to http://www.games.cheesymeat.com Of those page hits I got one (1) AdSense click for a daily total of $0.82.  I received 4 referrals to Big Fish Games, but no sales.  So another losing day.

Day 5:  I reduced my budget to $2.00 per day and lowered my bids on all of my keywords.  My budget went down by more than half, but I still got 40 clicks to my site with a better CTR.  My Adsense received 1 click for $0.20 (WOOHOO!!)  Big fish got 2 more referrals.

Day 6:  I added a second ad variant to see if I could improve the already good CTR.  I also bumped the budget back to $5.00 after tweaking my keywords a bit.  results?  A total of 80 clicks, split pretty evenly between the 2 ads.  From Adsense, 5 clicks, $1.33.  1 more big fish referral.

Day 7:  Same campaign as above, 2 ads got 42 clicks each, total of 82.  AdSense totaled up at 9 clicks and $3.97.  My best day yet, but still not enough to recuperate what I am paying for advertising.

Day 8:  I drastically altered my campaign, I hacked out any keywords that weren’t performing and once again adjusted my bids.  I lowered my budget back to $2.00.  only 18 clicks today but a very nice CTR (my best yet).  AdSense got 1 click $.24 (ouch!)

Day 9: Final day of experiment.  Budget back to $5.00 (although I only let it run up to about $4.00) 37 clicks, At Adsense, 3 clicks for $1.55.

Sum it up:  This has been an extremely educational experiment.  Definitely not immediately profitable for me, but has potential for paying customers later at Big Fish.  Total cost of AdWords campaign was $42.67.  Remember I was given this from Signing up with StartLogic.  So I really made $11.21 from AdSense, but if I had paid for the advertising I LOST. Not really what we are after here.  On a side note according to Google analytics, my site saw over 500 unique visitors in these 9 days, with a bounce rate of 39%.  I am pleased with these numbers if nothing else.

See you soon with my next experiment, which is already in the works………