More Revenue Than Google AdSense

I have gained enough insight in the last one year by going through a few forums and reading about people’s experience and numbers that made me realize a few things. They are

* The same website can’t do well in both Google AdSense and Affiliate programs. Typically, it’s one or the other.
* However, usually CPC advertising beats the CPA affiliate income by a wide margin.
* Good pagerank doesn’t always translate into a good traffic. There are websites I know that have just a PR 4 but get as many as 100K views a month! And then there are PR 6 websites that would be glad to get more than 3K a month.

So, there is really no single source to optimize your website revenue. It depends on the characteristics of the website. If you have a high PR but low traffic website, then you are better off participating in link selling/buying program than in Google AdSense since it pays you more. For example, if you have a PR6 website with about 100 views/day (3K visits per month). Say you get a CTR (click-through-rate) of 3% (which is quite high actually). It converts to 90 clicks a month. Say the CPC is $0.25 (which is also reasonably high these days). It translates to $22.50 a month. However, if you participate in link selling/buying program, you can easily get $25 per link (at 50% commission) and with 4 links, you get $100.00 a month! So, why would you go for advertising when you can get more money by placing links?

Yes, I know selling/buying links is not liked by search engines, more with Google. But then, it’s all about supply vs demand. Isn’t it? Why else, would people want to bid for keywords instead of expecting Google to charge flat fee with round-robin slots? Similarly, there are some companies who are willing to spend extra money to improve both their page rank and also their website visibility as widely as possible. For example, what has kosmix.com anything to do with daily.stanford.edu? Or with www.arabicnews.com?

Microsoft Reduces Google AdWords Effectiveness

A little over a year back, I wrote the article
Searching = Playing Lottery. Today Microsoft announced giving cash back for searching and buying products through their search engine.

The reaction to this has been mixed. People claiming it to be not going to make any dent to Google’s search share to thinking it to be an interesting idea to try it out.

While people have been talking about how this move by Microsoft is going to impact the search share, I think this has a greater impact on Google’s bread and butter, it’s revenue from advertising. Here is why.

Say you want to buy a digital camera. You do all the research on Google and in process clicking a few ads and going to the advertiser’s website. Once you did your research and decided on the exact model to buy, then you simply go to Microsoft, search for the product and click the ad and buy the product. Vola, you get 2% to 30% back! Now what happens to all those advertisers that bid on Google? Essentially their conversion rates are going to decrease! And this is the biggest threat to Google, not the fear that it might lose the search market share. So, essentially Microsoft is able to make the Google advertising less effective with this move!

The Ad Quality Decay

I have tried a handfull of ad networks and the reason to switch from one to the other is either poor click-through-rate or poor eCPM. Granted I don’t have a great site rich of content and so don’t deserve $1.00 CPC ads. Well, not even $0.25.

I recently started using kontera on a PR4 website. First one month went well. CPC ranged from $0.05 to $0.40. Then the ads started deteriorating. Within the 3rd month, there are ads that weren’t even fetching $0.01 per click! One key reason is, most of the ads are template junk from us.com and findstuff.com.

I think ad networks should pay attention not only to the quality of publishers but also the quality of advertisers. My PR4 website recently changed to PR6 and I get more and more targeted traffic. So, why would I want to waste my visitors time for those fraction of pennies with junk ads? So, I removed those ads off my website.

All those who don’t have much traffic but whatever traffic that you get, if it’s a little bit targeted, try just using Amazon affiliate program. The fraction of pennies are not going to get you cross even $10.00 a year! So, even those occasional purchases from the affiliate links on your website could potentially fetch you more money!

Note that the issue is not just related to kontera. Same with adbrite and a few other ad networks as well.

In this regard, I appreciate what Google has done, enforcing certain level of standards for their advertisers in terms of better landing pages and the recent change of display url and the landing page url coming from the same domain.