Are you in the UK ?
I got one of those letters too.

I'm in Ireland and received an Adwords voucher. I haven't used Adwords before but as I am launching a new section on one of my sites, I was almost tempted.

Regards...jmcc

What is the value of the voucher?

FarmBoy

£50 in the UK

Do you have a lot more content than you do ads? If so, then go for it.

Got one for 100 EUR myself over the weekend. Just to tempt me to use adwords I guess. I might actually use it for a site that's not got any adsense on it. Free traffic, free experience with adwords ...

Reading WW it seems I'm not alone in shelving a $10k / month AW campaign after introducing AS to my site. While I'd like to say I'm confident my landing page fall comfortably inside the guidelines, like parachuting I only have to get in wrong once before I'm forced to quit.

Given the Draconian penalty that awaits those G deems to have gamed the system, is there any way to get G to offer an approval or otherwise in advance? The amount of money not being spent on AW through nervousness must be enough to warrant some correspondence.

As for vouchers, I have received several, both from AW ("please come back to us"), and AS ("why not try this for a laugh"). Always in the USD50-100 bracket, they sit on my desk like a pile of C notes trying to lure me into a game of Russian Roulette.

Dick

[edited by: ThirdWheel at 9:01 am (utc) on June 16, 2009]

If you have a voucher for "free" use of AdWords for a while, it might be worth setting up some ads and sending the traffic to a page without AdSense on it. That should remove the concern about arbitrage and allow you to get an advertiser's perspective on the process.

See if you experience the things that were discussed in this thread - [webmasterworld.com...]

FarmBoy

Given the Draconian penalty that awaits those G deems to have gamed the system, is there any way to get G to offer an approval or otherwise in advance? The amount of money not being spent on AW through nervousness must be enough to warrant some correspondence.

Not that I'm aware of.

I've never had a problem using AdWords to drive traffic to the one site with AdSense on it (and maintain excellent quality scores too) but there are some key points that Google may look at when evaluating such things -

- my site has more content than ads

- my site doesn't include ads on pages with less content, or on "maintenance" pages such as contact pages, etc.

- my site has a number of trusted backlinks, including some .gov and .edu

- my site has been around since 1999

- my site has *really* good organics, and a reasonable bounce rate.

All of these add up to trust. If your page has some good trust factors, you're probably okay.

If it doesn't - maybe you shouldn't risk it until it does.

In respnse to the question ; ' Is this arbitrage '

Yes.. If you make more from adSense than you spend on adwords.

I also got $50 value voucher in India, but it was almost 2 weeks back I think. I didn't use that voucher yet.

Thanks for the reply, Netmeg. We can tick most of those boxes (site is younger than 10 years, no .gov backlinks in sight), and I have always liked to assume we'd probably be ok, but that still introduces an uncomfortable element of doubt.

One thing we have considered doing is coding the landing pages not show AS if the referrer was AW; vistors landing on same page via other means would see AS. It's unlikely we could prove it after the fact, but G's logs would surely support this, so I wonder if that approach could mitigate us from any claims of arbitrage?

Dick

I got that coupon exactly on Jun 4.

Netmeg has set very high standards. I like to believe that as long as the site can pass a Human Review in terms of enough useful unique content, it should be safe. It is a subjective view but if you must use adWords to send traffic to adSense sites, you should be prepared to walk a thin line.

BTW, I have been sending adWords tarffic to sites with adSense for apx. 3 years now. I don't meet Netmeg's standards , not all of them. I do have enough unique useful content, or so I believe.

[edited by: Green_Grass at 3:44 pm (utc) on June 16, 2009]

I wouldn't expect every site to meet all of those - but the unique content is probably among the most important.

The point is, Google has to have *some* basis for trust, if you want to reduce the risk factors.