Rory Hansen

A little bit of history on the Firefox / Yahoo! Search Marketing challenge

So, as many of you may remember, I ran an experiment way back a year or two ago, seeing how much money I could make through Google’s Firefox browser referral program. I started with essentially a $50 credit with Yahoo! Search Marketing, and then expanded to include other PPC programs, such as Google Adwords. Shortly afterwards, after a quick windfall of a few thousand dollars over the course of a couple months, I shut the program down due to the ever expanding cash flow requirements for shrinking profits.

Well, Yahoo! is back with another promotion, giving you a $100 credit towards clicks, so long as you deposit $30 (and not refunding it!). This coincides nicely with the release of Firefox 3.0, as there’ll be a large focus on downloading the new release of the very popular browser.

So, the challenge resumes…

Anyway, I started up the ads tonight, and spent just over $30 for 195 clicks, coming in at an average cost per click (CPC) of $0.17. Google doesn’t like us talking about exact figures, but I can tell you that I lost about $16 overall in the process tonight, as the cost of clicks fromYahoo! exceeded the conversion revenues I earned from Google.

Basically, how it works is that you do not get credit for a conversion if the visitor had downloaded and installed Firefox in the past on that same computer. So, although I had 195 click throughs to my site from Yahoo! Search, with a majority of those clicking on afterwards to download Firefox from Google, I only got credited with a few conversions.

(Of course, it doesn’t help that Google supplies an older version of the browser for download too, probably causing most users to click away once they realize this fact. But I knew that going into this and took that as a known risk.)

Explanation of results

Because existing Firefox users are essentially worthless in this scheme, I made the appropriate enhancements to my landing pages last year, using JavaScript to detect the user’s browser, and if they’re using Firefox, to redirect them to a custom page. This custom page had no link to download Firefox, but instead, a selection of the finest ads that Google Adsense could serve up. I figured that this might offset the cost of Firefox visitors clicking on my ads a little. But, looking at today’s summary, we’re talking puny returns. In the grand scheme of things, click throughs for “Firefox” related keywords are extremely low.

Next steps

Anyway, I’m waiting for Yahoo! to credit my account with the promised $100 credit. Once they do so, I’ll resume my campaign, but I doubt I’ll continue once the funds run out.