Week 1 Results of the Google Ads Campaign

A little over a week ago, we mentioned that we started a Google Ad campaign. It’s now been a week, so here’s an update.

A little over a week ago, we announced that we had begun an experiment by using Google Ads to promote the site. It was a pretty expensive experiment (with an estimated cost of $1,400, averaging out to about $50 per day), but it made sense that we at least experiment with this effort and see what happens. We also said that we’d take you along for the ride so you can experience, well, what we were experiencing.

I meant to do this yesterday while I still had the numbers, but I admit that I got a bit distracted with a whole bunch of other stuff, so it was only today that I got around to this.

On April 1, our ads account said that it pulled in 114 clicks. Our internal statistics were hitting around 1,000 views based on what I recall, so it accounted for just over 10% of the total traffic. This wasn’t exactly the most inspiring start, but things got even bumpier on day 2.

On April 2, we got a grand total of 0 clicks. The problem was with the payment structure that was put in place by default. What I thought would happen is that I would get maybe a weekly bill, but as it turned out, we seemingly got transactions showing up on the credit card multiple times in a single day. We got a charge of $20, then a credit of $20, then a charge of $8, and then an error message saying that the credit card is declining the charges. Google dutifully threw up warnings all over my account saying that I need to fix my credit card or risk having my ad campaign stopped. I have to admit, this is the first time I’ve ever had a vendor charge me a near real time rate (as opposed to weekly or monthly), so it was unsurprising that the payment was declined (who knows how many transactions it tried to do in rapid succession like that?). Naturally, I made a voluntary payment of $500 so both Google and my credit card can be happy. Luckily for me, the payment went through that time and things seemingly restarted. ON a side note, without ads, the site got a total of 688 views which isn’t bad at all if you ask me.

With things getting restarted, we move on to April 3. On that day, the ads managed to pull in a whopping 80 clicks. Considering I got a grand total of 1,530 clicks that day, the ads campaign was barely a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. Of course, accounting for the rise in clicks would be the clicks I got from the viral article which, in total, pulled in 2,692 clicks as of this writing, so a nice portion of the clicks are related to that.

On April 4th, the ads say I got 602 clicks from advertising. Internal statistics showed I got a total of 1,820 clicks. So, very likely, a large portion of the rest of the clicks from going viral were the result of the spike. So, those statistics barely reached a third of the traffic.

April 5th is where things started getting interesting. The ads say I generated 705 clicks. In total, the internal traffic shows I got a total of 992 clicks in all. So, supposedly, the ads accounted for a vast majority of the clicks.

April 6th shows that the ads generated 579 clicks. In total, the site got 1,071 overall.

April 7th shows that the ads generated 607 clicks while the internal statistics showed I had a total of 1,069 total clicks.

In the same time period, the ad campaign had generated a total of 135,000 impressions as well, so supposedly, loads more people now know about my site. At the same time, there has been no additional supporters on either Ko-Fi or Patreon. What’s more, I don’t believe I’ve seen any new commenters posting on this site either. While that sounds like something that is not super surprising, the news isn’t any better on the Adsense side of things. In total, the revenues for the month up to this point netted me a total of $1.48.

So, in all, for the price of $414.97, I earned $1.48. In other words, I got a return on investment of 0.357% so far in the first week of the campaign (assuming all ad revenue came from the campaign which is definitely not true. I suspect most of it came from going viral with the report.)

Obviously, the campaign is far from over as I have a few more weeks left to go. For what it’s worth, I found a setting that said that I could optimize the campaign to use the most effective ad assets, so naturally, I turned that on. How useful that is is unclear, but it at least sounded like a good idea at least.

Still, the idea is that I put money into advertising so that I can earn enough to put more money into advertising. In the first week? Ehh, not really delivering, but I’ll be seeing what the next few weeks brings.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.