Week 3 Results of the Google Ads Campaign

We now have the results of the third week of our experiment with a Google Ads campaign. Here’s what we saw.

We are approaching the end of our experiment with our Google ads campaign. When I announced our experiment at the beginning part of the month, I said that I was spending $1,400 on this campaign – or about $50 per day. I didn’t know what impact this would have on the site, but I did know that this kind of advertising has been suggested by some as a way to bolster our online presence. While I was a bit skeptical that this would significantly help the site, I nevertheless went ahead with this one anyway because I wanted to exhaust all available options to making this site a success.

So far, week 1 had hiccup, but it was able to get a number of clicks. Week 2 was a bit more of the same, though it had a day or so where the ads generated hardly any clicks.

One thought did cross my mind as I neared the end of week 3. What would happen when the ad campaign ended? Would I go back to the normal level of traffic again as if this campaign never happened? Honestly, I’m not sure, but I have heard stories of this very thing happening to other people when they had an ad campaign. Once the campaign ends, so do the clicks. A part of me is thinking that this is the very thing that would happen to me as well.

Anyway, I do have results for the campaign for this week, so here are the numbers:

April 14, the ad campaign generated 445 clicks. The internal statistics showed the site got 2,192 clicks (which is unusually good).

On April 15, the ad campaign generated 228 clicks. The internal statistics showed that the site got 1,747 clicks.

On April 16, the ad campaign generated 530 clicks. The internal statistics showed that the site got 2,434 clicks.

On April 17, the ad campaign generated 24 clicks (yes, twenty four). The internal statistics showed that the site got 1,892 clicks.

On April 18, the ad campaign generated 16 clicks (yes, sixteen). The internal statistics showed that the site got 2,023 clicks.

Finally, on April 19, the ad campaign generated 47 clicks. The internal statistics showed that the site got 1,965 clicks.

For the week before the campaign, the site got around 250 – 500 clicks. So, yes, there has been a significant improvement in the numbers. The thing is, clicks is one thing, am I getting a good return on investment?

Well, the ads campaign dashboard says I spent $1,027.27 so far this month. According to my Adsense, the website generated $2.33 in total. There are no new subscribers on Patreon and no new additional donations on Ko-Fi. So, in all, I, so far, got a return on investment (very optimistically) of -$1,024.94.

I can definitely say that while the clicks are nice to see, the returns I’m getting leave a heck of a lot to be desired. If I was getting a return on investment of about $800 or $900, I might be inclined to think that maybe I could put together some tweaks for the campaign and roll out a second month. The thing is, I’m not even getting close to such a return which has me doubting that any tweak to such a campaign could be meaningful enough to justify another investment in this manner. Still, I do have another week on this campaign, so maybe something could inspire a hint of confidence for me in all of this.

One concept I am familiar with is “meaningful traffic”. Yes, you could very easily set up a website an generate millions of clicks. That isn’t exactly the hardest thing to pull off. The problem is that such clicks are, more often then not, bot clicks. They don’t generate any meaningful clicks because they don’t necessarily write comments nor do they generate clicks for ads, ensuring that ad revenue comes back to the site so that better content and offerings can be made. It’s just useful for making a number go nice and high and that’s about it. More often then not, a high number doesn’t necessarily translate into business success.

This is what I’m struggling with here. Is this ad campaign generating meaningful traffic? Are new people really checking out my site or are these just, functionally, artificial clicks? I got a whole one comment from someone I don’t normally see and, well, who knows if that was from the ad campaign or somewhere else?

On a more optimistic side of things, it does have me thinking about the actual dollar value I am providing for the site. Obviously, it’s way more than a couple of cents that the Adsense provides. If anything, judging by the overall traffic, I’m providing anywhere between $25 – $500 per day. I have to say, if I was actually making that much money, there would be no question I would have invested in hiring additional writers, an editor, and additional staff to help me out. That would be the very first thing to do – get the workload stress of every day operations off of my shoulders finally. This would definitely be a viable business at that point. But hey, Project Bernanke, so almost no money for Freezenet.

Anyway, I’ll continue to monitor the situation and see what all happens moving forward. I’m not exactly hopeful still, but I’m going to continue to keep an open mind about this.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.