I had a great campaign on Adwords from January to March 09. It was a poker email submit offer.  Now gaming, gambling, and wagering is against the adwords TOS, but the campaign snuck by the reviewers and I had some pretty amazing results.  I had a 500%+ ROI and an amazing .07 average cost per click (CPC) with 600-800 clicks per day.  It took me about 3 hours to put the offer together on a Saturday night, and it ran with amazing profits for 9 weeks.

Aside from adding placements, I didn’t touch the campaign whatsoever. I was terrified Google would find it and slap so I didn’t touch anything that could trigger a manual review of the campaign and/or ads.

Of course the inevitable happened.. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were sitting down one afternoon, drinking beers, and wondering how they could have a little fun. They picked a random Adwords account, which happened to be mine, and started slapping campaigns.  Ok, they didn’t really do that, but it makes me feel better to go that route so whatever…

So my traffic was gone to an offer that was consistently converting well.  I tried to reload the campaign on another adwords account using a new domain/creatives/etc., but they disapproved it near immediately.  Then I got a “final warning” email from Google so I figured I had better just let the campaign die.

I was doing month-end for March 09 when I ran placement reports and found that I only had 4 sites that sent the majority of traffic to the poker offer.  I decided to contact the sites directly and see if I couldn’t buy some ad space or purchase whatever option they had to get my creatives back on their pages.

3 of the sites didn’t bother responding, but a 4th not only responded, they indicated they had a lot of traffic to unload and would take their $2 CPM rate down to $0.30 CPM (Cost per thousand) so I jumped at the chance.  I paid $750 for 2.5 million impressions, which I know sucks but I wanted to test out this traffic direct to the offer and see just how well things would convert.  This was perfect as the site was exclusive to poker players and they had TONS of volume each day.

I was really disappointed in the site’s backend ad serving software.  I was used to being able to add my own creatives, edit the URLs, and pause traffic.  Here I had to go through the sales rep and it wasn’t the quickest response rate.

The first 2 days were terrible, I had a .16% CTR (Click through rate) and conversions were a paltry 16%, far less than the 40% I got through adwords.  In a new twist, I found the advertisor was scrubbing the hell out of my leads, which I found odd because they weren’t flagrant about it before.  The end of the 2nd day I told them to pause the traffic, I had ~500,000 impressions served and only $120 to show for it.  I decided that I’d spend the weekend working on a new offer, and whitelabel the creatives to this site.

I wanted the users of the site to see that this is an exclusive offer to them (even though it isn’t) and that they are getting one hell of a deal on whatever it was I was pitching.

As of this post, I haven’t decided what to display with the final 2 million impressions, but I’m leaning towards bizopp.

The buy negotiations were easy enough, I feel I got a good into rate at .30 CPM, and they treated me like royalty, even though I’m probably one of the smallest buys they’ve done.

Things I would change in the future are:

1. I’d have a 48 hour clause
2. I’d get some ‘bonus’ impressions added.  TV stations do this all the time, you may buy a 200-spot prime time package, but ask for another 200 spots in the overnight hours for free.
3. I’d make sure I had control of the creatives and URLs, and if not, see if I could use my own ad server and they simply stick the placement code on their site.

I’ll keep you posted on future developments in this campaign/media buy, but for now, I’m rating my first buy as a bust, but a great learning experience.

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