Content Marketing

adCenter for Adsense… this can’t be okay

RobberI have a pretty good thing going on over at Payraise Calculator. The site has low visits, but high advertiser CTR with Google Adsense. It’s nothing that I would retire off of but the site has a profit margin of over 200% sustained. (It’s often made me wonder whether I should simply work on building a thousand more internet free tools with Adsense… that could be a tidy income!)

Yesterday, I signed up for a deal on Microsoft adCenter and with it came $200 worth of free advertising. I read through the FAQs and Terms of Use and it didn’t spell out, in any way, that it would be illegal to use that advertising to drive traffic to another website, where Google Adsense is installed.

So that’s what I did. I signed up, set up a $200 budget and told it to run until depleted. That $200 will get Payraise Calculator listed on paid search results in the #1 position for 4 keywords I selected. Those people will be driven to Payraise Calculator where they will be met with additional Adsense links. Using my average CTR, I’ll make between $10 and $20.

Someone paid for that! I don’t believe I did anything that would be deemed inappropriate for the advertiser, but I do feel a little dirty. I’ve seen this technique used by aggregators quite a bit. They bait links that they pay little for to take you to sites where valid Advertisers have a much higher CTR. So the math works if they can sustain a good enough CTR on the advertisements. Aggregators are usually in it for the money alone, though. The sites normally lack any quality content. In contrast, Payraise Calculator is a valid site with both content and a tool for visitors to use.

Is it wrong? Or is it the same as if I had simply gotten some business off of that $200?

Note: I did this as an experiment to compare response rates and to test the system. If this is, indeed, improper – please let me know.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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