Auction Ads as an alternative to Adsense

May 29, 2007 7:14 pm Published by

I recently read some positive comments about Auction Ads, an alternative to Google adsense which allows you to display Adsense style ads website of Ebay listings. You earn commision from people signing up with Ebay as well as earning a percentage of the total amount.

It sounds a great product and so signed up, putting the code on just one page, but with a good number of daily page views and excellent Adsense clickthough rate. I left it for a few days and waited for the money to come rolling in.

Unfortunately Auction Ads on this test failed to perform at all. The Adwords CTR on this page is generally 30-40 percent, which is way above my overall average, so one of my top earning Adsense pages; the Auction Ads CTR on the same page in exactly the same position was….

…just 2.6 percent and my total earnings over this period were $0.

I’m not going to write Auction Ads off at the moment, I’ll take a look at running more tests, but what I do know is that you need to be careful. If you do change over do it slowly, preferably split testing each change. In this particular example I think that the Adsense Ads are much better targetted to the page than the Auction Ads, hence the excellent CTR, so I’ll look at a fairly high traffic page with bad Adsense CTR as my next test.

Let me know how you are getting on with Auction Ads.

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This post was written by David

2 Comments

  • Money From Home says:
    June 1, 2007 at 01:02

    You get a 40% click % on adsense ads? you must be getting very rich! Google says click % is about 2% – 4%

  • david says:
    June 1, 2007 at 09:47

    I kill adsense on any page with clickthrough of less than around 10% as there is almost always a better monetization method. Google may say 2-4%, but what percentage of Adsense publishers never even think of optimizing ad position and layout?

    I’ve had as high as 80% for some pages, not with a huge amount of traffic, but it can easily be done with a little thought and some testing.

    Just checked and my average CTR across all Adsense pages for the last 12 months are as follows:

    Adsense for content: 15.80%
    Adsense for search: 8.32%

    The key is driving highly targetted traffic to those pages.