How to Benefit from Combining AdSense™ and AdWords™

Publishers can use AdWords™ as an effective way to increase targeted traffic — the fundamental inducer of higher CTR.

Associating the two programs is a strategy meant to increase revenue from your main activity. An analysis of this strategy involves two perspectives: publishers using AdWords™ and advertisers using AdSense™.

What is AdWords™?

AdWords™ is the Pay Per Click advertising program offered by Google™. Advertisers create their own ads, thematizing them on specific keywords and pay every time someone clicks on them. Earlier this year, Google™ has introduced the Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) system — advertisers pay every time an impression of the ad is registered.

AdWords™ for Publishers

As a publisher, you have the possibility of increasing targeted traffic of your site by leading an AdWords™ campaign on the niche you need. The aim is to pay low on ads to attract visitors and to direct them towards high paying ads.

Theoretically, this is the mechanism:

You optimize your site for high-paying keywords in your area of interest so that you can obtain high paying ads (hopefully).
You start an AdWords™ campaign on one or more low-paying keywords (keyword phrases of three or four words are less competitive) that are still closely related to your niche. This will increase targeted traffic to your site.
You customize and find the most favorable placement for your ads so you can get more clicks on the ads you want, the ones that have the highest CPC.

In practice, only a small part of the visitors arriving on your site will click on ads. To make it profitable you have to find low CPC ads and keywords (the ones with minimum bid — usually less competitive phrases often contain three or four words and for the strategy to work better it is recommendable to find and use a couple of such phrases) to attract traffic and high CPC ads displaying on your pages.

Bottom line

Traffic that you get thru AdWords is quality traffic, from "qualified clickers": surfers arriving on your page by a click are more probable to leave it by clicking.
Getting good results from AdWords, you may increase your budget and go for other PPC networks (e.g. Overture) and thus increase your traffic even more.
You'll have to have enough patience, as it may happen the results are not obvious immediately (it may take up to about two months).
Obtaining only higher traffic is an advantage.

The question is whether it is worth, whether you can make a profit out of it or not, and that's something you calculate and decide. Fact is that using an AdSense-AdWords mixed campaign is profitable only when used for sites that feature high bidding advertisers.

AdSense™ for Advertisers

As an advertiser, you may want to use AdSense to reccuperate your AdWords expenses or at least to reduce them, by earning some extra money. You do this by displaying ads on your site, but paying extra-care to the displayed ads so as not to end up advertising for your competitors!

Find a more detailed article on how to use best AdSense as an advertiser on AdwordsHowTos.com.