A bizarre waste of money

Posted by Nick Loadholtes on 9/17/2006 filed in Blogging, Thinking, Web

I was in GMail today and I glanced up at the little ads that run along the top. You know, the one liners. Since those ads are based off of the content of your mail box, more often than not there’s something up there I’m at least a little bit interested in.

Tonight there was an ad that said:

Andrew Smith – www.AndrewSmith.com – Site of Andrew Smith. Nothing much to see here.

WTF? I know people named “Andrew” and I probably have an email or two with the name “Smith” in it, but this is just odd. I clicked on the link to see what it was. It was a parked domain. With a note that said “this domain is NOT for sale”. Other than that it just had search boxes and weather forecasts.

My question is why would someone buy ads for a domain like this? I know adwords are cheap and all, but if your site isn’t selling anything, and it isn’t for sale, then why advertise it? Maybe this is some new Web 2.0 trend/business model…


2 Responses to “A bizarre waste of money”

  1. Andrew Smith Says:
    December 14th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    Hello, this is Andrew Smith at AndrewSmith.com.

    An answer to your question! Yes, this was an experiment, which was costing me 1 cent per click with search and content targeting in Adwords. In the past month, I’ve received 74 visitors (including a curious you) to the site for a grand total wasted of $0.74. Not exactly breaking the bank.

    Generally in Adwords I bid low (or not at all) for content bids. I also wanted to compare content vs. search.

    Click through rate has been as follows for content:

    Clicks – Impresstions – Rate
    74 65,374 0.11%

    For Search, much better click through, but less traffic!:
    Clicks – Impresstions – Rate
    18 435 4.13%

    What have a learned? That I can get traffic to a site for very little cost (of course, this depends on the keyword).

    Hope this answers your question!

    Andrew Smith

  2. Nick Says:
    December 14th, 2006 at 9:59 am

    I stand corrected! That’s a pretty good experiment. I had no idea that a) you could get ads for so little, and b) that you could get traffic for so little. I’ve never messed around with buying adwords, so this is very interesting info.

    I still think it is odd that the ad kept popping up in my Gmail ads, but hey, it got you some traffic, so it must be working! And all for 74 cents, that’s not too shabby….

    Good luck with the site!

    -Nick

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