“$100 gift for FREE, for Google AdWords!”

“$50 credits for FREE, for Facebook advertising!”

What is this? Nothing but a new and improved form of the old “free trial for N days“. Because what both Google and Facebook give you is NOT a gift, but rather a smart and diabolic way to take your money away!

I’ve got the first surprising “gift” from Google, on St. Valentine’s, by mail. Why not, I told myself. And I finally created an AdWords account and a first campaign. I gave them my credit card, just to avoid a $20 fee for prepaid accounts. I had to pay however a $10 activation fee (!?). But what is $10 compared to a $100 gift, for FREE?!

I also remembered I had some similar credits, also for AdWords, accumulated from my GoDaddy services. Tried to use those $75 as well, but surprise, it wasn’t possible: they work only for a first AdWords account, and I just created one with my first “gift”.

Lucky me, I had another $50 credits for Facebook! Created another account, used my “gift” as well, another “activation fee” paid separately (because this cannot be deducted from the “gift”). You give them your credit card number, your address, your name…

Few days latter, with these $150 for nothing, I paid few bucks to Google and Facebook and the result is I brought less than a total of 200 people on one of my sites, that already gets over 1,000 visitors a day. I do not sell anything, and this form of online advertising proved to be useless to me. In actual value, I rather paid more to Google and Facebook in “activation fees”, than the benefits I got from their so-called “$150 for FREE”.

…I’m not mad, I’m not sad, I do not criticize anything and anybody. I’m rather impressed with this new form of advertising, that’s all. But next time someone will tell me “I’ll give you money for FREE”, I’ll look more closely at how much I would actually put at the end of the day in their pockets…

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