How FEE.org gets 30,000 free monthly clicks with Dynamic Search Ads

FEE.org gets about 30,000 clicks from our primary Google AdWords account per month. This is not a lot of traffic – about one day of organic visitors – but the vast majority of Google traffic comes from new users, so it is an important source of new users.

The best part is that this traffic is totally free: FEE get’s a $40,000 per month AdWords credit from Google’s Grants program. That’s $480,000 of free advertising per year!

There are some catches you should be aware of:

  1. A maximum cost-per-click limit of $2.00
  2. Only text ad campaigns are supported
  3. Your ads show below those of paying advertisers
  4. A daily spend limit of 1/30th of your monthly total

In practice, these conditions make it difficult to hit your daily spend limit. Even if you do hit your limit (for example, by targeting hundreds of low-traffic keywords), it can be difficult to send your visitors to fresh content because someone has to keep creating new ads for new articles on your site.

Google AdWords offers an ingenious solution to this challenge: Dynamic Search Ads. This campaign type uses Google Search’s index of your site to automatically create ads matching the keywords that people are searching for. It’s as if someone creates a new ad every time new content is posted on your site! Using Dynamic Search, FEE.org is able to spend about 50% of our $40K budget on ads that send people to the latest FEE.org articles.

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