Poker Sharks.co.uk

Over the last couple of years I have spent a fair amount of money on Google Adwords trying to pull in potential players for Poker Sharks.  For the price of 10p I could get in a user who will hopefully signup and play, and at that price it’s a great deal.  The budget is totally in your control and if you’re having a cash-strapped week you can reduce this budget very easily.  Unlike with other advertisers who want all the money upfront with no guarantee of traffic.

Google Adwords can promise you one thing – traffic, as you only pay for the clicks you get, but they don’t say of what quality.  If you spend (for example) £5 a day and set your cost per click (CPC) to 10p you will get over 50 clicks for your money – Great.  £5 gets me 50 potential players which is a bargain and I can’t complain.  Through experience only around 10-15 of those clicks will result in actual sign ups – that’s still fine, a lot of people don’t like signing up to a site on their first landing.  Hopefully they’ll come back or hear the Poker Sharks name somewhere else and then take the 2 minutes to try the game out.  All this was over a year ago.  As of the last couple of months I have stopped most of my advertising through Adwords. Why?  Well I’m glad you asked that question….

The internet has grown in leaps and bounds and the average person is now looking to make a bit of cash through it.  The easiest and most obvious way of doing this is shoving some Adsense on your blog/webpage (like on this blog).  At the beginning this was fine; Google would only display my ads on relevant sites so the click throughs were good.  Gradually this has decreased.  In my eyes there are 3 main reasons for why Advertisers aren’t getting value for money any more.

1. Bloggers helping Bloggers ‘Thank you clicks’– As the community of bloggers grows by the minute it has become ‘polite’ or at least ‘nice’ that once you have finished reading a blog entry to click a few adverts to almost reward the blogger for a nice article.  Regardless of what these adverts are, just click a few, close them down and carry on.  These clicks to me are a total waste and are near worthless to me as an advertiser.
2. Bloggers getting smart – I’ve increasing noticed adsense ads being positioned in such positions that you may mistakenly click whilst scrolling down the page.  The most common being a massive group of ads shoved in with the bulk of the text – people rant and rave on how well these ads perform and Google actively encourages such techniques.  They totally gloss over the fact that the money comes from ACCIDENTAL clicks not genuine ones.  A few times I’ve been reading an article, gone to scroll down and clicked a link – once this link is open I am inclined to have a look, but 9 times out of 10 I hit the red cross asap.  Tricking users into clicking your ad isn’t what I want; it makes my site be made to look like an annoying pop-up which can leave a bad impression.
3. MFA Sites (Made For Adense) – these sites are sites that pretend to be genuine sites with real content but are in fact a fake site full of adverts disguised as content.  All they act as is a poor version of a Google search, although they cost me 10p per click.  I don’t want a user searching their site for an online game when they could have done the same in a normal Google search that would have cost me nothing.  These sites are cluttering up the internet and I for one don’t want a single click off any of them.  Genuine sites only please.

Now for users of ADSENSE, as in you’re the one displaying the ads – its great news.  You can deploy all 3 of the above and possibly make a nice income from wasting other people’s money.  If that’s how you want to be remembered then fine, have a blast.  The real problem is for ADWORD users trying to promote their site.  Over the last year the performance of my clicks to signups has halved.  For every 50 clicks I used to get 10-15 signups I’m now lucky to get 5.  That’s now £1 per signup, with countless wasted clicks.  My reduced spend isn’t purely motivated by the fact my own signup rate has gone down from these ads.  In fact I’d still be happy with the current rate.  The main reason for me stopping most of my Adwords advertising is because I don’t want to fund;

• a) bloggers living off fake adsense clicks.
• b) MFA sites cluttering up the internet.

The only people profiting from this are the above and GOOGLE, oh yes, and that’s why it will never stop.  It will get a lot worse before it gets better.  Google is making a killing off these methods of ad clicking and they don’t want it to stop as it makes them lot’s of money.

However, there is a way around this for the Adword advertisers out there.  Rather than trust Google to choose the positioning of your ads, you can tell Google the URLs of the sites you want to advertise on to avoid the fake clicks.  If you come accross a site that you’d like to advertise on click the ‘advertise on this site’ (click if you want to advertise on Poker Sharks) link under the Google ads and submit your ad – you can even have a seperate budget for that one site if you want.  You may have to raise you CPC as competition will be higher on the best sites – but at least you know your money is only going to the sites you choose and not funding a scam somewhere.

I’d like to think people using adsense would control their advertising and not try these dubious (yet legal) methods and seperate content from adverts to allow their readers a nicer experience, and their advertisers a valuable click when they get one (rather than 10 worthless ones) – but then I’m not THAT niave.  These techniques make money so they’ll do it for as long as the money continues to roll in.

It’s the advertisers that can make a difference here and lead the way, hopefully the Adsense users will follow.  I urge all Adword advertisers to individually pick the websites you advertise on.  Avoid the sites that bombard their users with adsense left right and centre, go for the ones that place them neatly around the edges.  The days of lazy Adword advertising is over, you need to be a bit smarter if you want to get maximum benefit from your money.  Don’t let Google choose positioning of your ads, do it yourself or risk wasting up to 90% of your budget on fake clicks that will line the pockets of the adsense scammers.  By all means use the sites that make £10,000+ in Adsense income a month, they’ll eat up your budget no problem and get you clicks but I doubt they will translate into income for yourself.

I will still advertise using Adwords and I’ll continue to use Adsense.  Although my adsense will be discrete but in visible positions that if people are interested in the ad then they can click.  No doubt my income from this source will be down, but the users experience, trust and enjoyment will be up and that will result in a higher income further down the line.

I’m not even going to entertain InteliTXT that merges ads within content to make it look like the author is linking to a relevant webpage that is in fact an advert.  Then there’s Pay Per Post for Bloggers…..

Can I have some content with my adverts please waitor, or a side order of morality?