A couple months ago I experimented with a Google ad for my animal rights site. Considering the site is largely noncommercial, the return on investment was very low. I paid something like $25 total for a few thousand text ads and the response rate was about what I’ve seen on ads I run on my own site — less than 1 percent.
Now, though, Google has followed that up with an excellent cost-per-click advertising system called AdWords Select. This lets people place text ads by keywords, but only pay on a cost-per-click basis.
Currently, for example, I have textads running on about 100 different search words. I’m paying $.05 per clickthrough and can limit the total amount per day per ad (so if I set a $1 limit, after the 20th click-through of the day, the ad will no longer be served until the next day).
Clickthrough rate is still about in the 1 percent range or so, but this is still a bargain basement promotion method (in fact, I’m less interested in clickthroughs than having my shortened URL appear on Google searches for topics like “animal rights” or “peta.”)
This is an incredible — and cheap — promotional tool.