Google is using adwords to promote my website

I’m not kidding you! Google has really begun to promote my website via adwords - FOR FREE. What makes this even better is that the ads also show up in adsense on my website, so I get paid to have my services promoted! I know this sounds unbelievable but it is true!

The catch is that Google isn’t advertising my website directly. But this is pretty much just as good as if they did, if not actually better! The thing is that quite some time ago I made a bunch of different Google home page gadgets. The primary purpose of these gadgets was to promote various websites, so I made gadgets that was useful on peoples start pages, yet they’d drive the users to my websites once in a while - just as any good website widgets should be like.

What then happened…

Then yesterday I noticed a decent increase in traffic on of my websites. I tracked which referrers suddenly delivered more traffic and all the extra traffic came from the personalized Google home pages. At this point I knew that it was simply because of the Google gadget associated with the website, and my server logs confirmed that the gadget usage had increased significantly. Still, I had no idea of what caused this, but I didn’t do any further research because I had no clue of where to look.

Later on I noticed the adsense eCPM had also increased for the site, yet the CTR was the same. So I checked my website to see if new ads where showing up, since it had to be because of some advertiser bidding more. And the first ad in the primary adsense block was an ad from Google. It promoted a home page gadget that - according to the ad copy - was just like mine. And indeed the Google gadget being advertised was mine.

What this means is that Google is using adwords to promote my website, since all the new users of the Google gadget will end up visiting my website once in a while. The ads for my Google gadget show up in both search results and in adsense, and there’s no cost to me. So thank you Google!

Google does this because…

I’m confident that Google does this to promote their personalized home pages. By advertising various cool gadgets that people can add to it, I’m sure that many more will end up using a personalized home page. To Google this means that they’ll end up increasing the amount of people using Google as their start page, which should result in more searches and increased usage of Google’s other services.

I managed to find a couple of other Google gadgets that they’re promoting, but it only seems to be a small part of them. And I don’t know about how they pick which gadgets to promote. What I’d currently suggest is factors such as usefulness and the amount of related searches where they can display adwords.