I’ve just jumped off a skype call with a blogger who has been testing Auction Ads since they were announced back in March.
He wishes to remain anonymous as he’s wanting to protect his niche – however was very very excited as he’d just received a payment from them that was bigger than anything he’d previously earned from a blog.
I’m not allowed to share his niche – except to say that it’s in an area that there is a healthy second hand market for products in.
I’ve heard from other bloggers that if you have content that relates well to anything with such a market that it will do well as the ad system draws its inventory from ebay.
I’ve dabbled with Auction Ads (with some success) but suspect that it will do incredibly well for some topics but not so well with others.
I’m interested to hear your feedback after two months of experimenting with Auction Ads (as I know many of you have been).
How is it working for you? What have you found to work best in terms of design, positioning and topics? Write us a mini review and share your experiences (anonymously or with your name – your choice).
Auction Ads – Google Adsense Alternative…
It’s no secret that while Google Adsense may be great, it’s not the absolute best way to make money for certain type of blogs. If you’re blogging in a certain niche market, AuctionAds may be your best alternative to Google Adsense.
U…
@tom
If your site gets 10 visitors a day…why do you even bother with advertising?
@Chris
I’m practicing. Just playing with things and learning the ropes. Someday I hope to get 20 visitors a day!
I’ve had some success with auction ads so far and am finding it somewhat better than Adsense in my niche.
Today I’m seeing some weirdness with them. Ads are not even closed to being relevant to my one keyword, which has tons of action on Ebay. I’m hoping they get this fixed quickly because my click rates have suffered heavily – gone from 3% down to 1%….
What do you think of AA Darren.?
I have started to use but no improvement yet
I’m finding them to work ok for my sites. My own niches are more focussed upon new products which don’t have such a good second hand market so I suspect some people do a lot better with them than me.
Having said that – I’m seeing improvements in the last week so they definitely have potential.
One of the things that makes them difficult to evaluate is that it can take days (and even weeks) to find out how much you earn on any given day because ebay’s payment system is slow and reliant upon seeing who wins an auction (that can take over a week).
For example if you refer the eventual winner of an auction you don’t find this out for a week or so – so while you don’t see any earnings on the day itself you might a week or so later. No way around it really – so it means you really need to test them for a month or so.
Only just started with AuctionAds and have found then returning a good click through rate but earnings per click on the low side. There have been some good comments here with some ideas to consider.
I am in a niche which I think is quite good for AuctionAds, but only time will tell.
When I first put up Auction Ads they were doing quite well, and ads were very relevant. After a few days, they discontinued showing relevant ads. In fact, the ads that are showing are about as far from my niche as you can get. I left them up to see if it would correct itself over time. Nothing has changed.
Not sure why it won’t show relevant ads, but the CTR is dismal due to the non-relevance of ads. I have the cache plugin activated. Could that possibly be a problem?
I have blogged about the issue of displaying relevant ads (based on your keywords) on AuctionAds every time.
You can find out how to get this to happen every time at http://andrewbuonocore.com
They work well for us, but nowhere near the $ amounts some are saying. Maybe we don’t have enough traffic or are targeting the wrong keywords.
We run about 10k impressions a day and get about 1% CTR.
We tested AuctionAds for over a month on a very busy niche site. As others have reported the click through rates were a little higher than for Google adsense ads. However, the returns were far less (between 1/10 and 1/20 of what google ads were paying in the same locations). There can be many reasons for this, the type of product, the fact that many of our users were already registered with ebay. . .
Our reported CTR was about 1%. About 1/3 our adsense ads. The earnings were miserable (eCPM= 0.38). It was good cheap advertising for ebay.
After several complaints about non-relevant ads we were told of an unpublished “10 minute” rule. We were told that if your site did not serve ads for over 10 minutes the keywords used would not be used and generic “hot item” ads would be served.
However, 1 page every 10 minutes is only 144 hits a day. We were doing many times more than that (and auction ads reported such). AND we had some small single page sites that ran below this number that always seemed to have the ads asked for. We came to the conclusion the “10 minute” rule was an excuse for a system that did not work.
The serious problem we had was the non-relevance of ads. When the system worked we got exactly what we expected. However, much of the time the system did not work. The final straw was when inappropriate ads for sexually based products were served to all of our pages. . . We closed our account and removed all the ad code.
If you care about what kind of ads run on your pages do not run Auction Ads.
If you care about income you SHOULD be making a minimum of $5 per 1000 page views. Some pages do $40 or more. So watch your statistics closely.
We’ll test it out for 2-3 months before we can draw any conclusions. Right now, I like what I see, and it will be interesting to compare how well this performs compared to our AdSense and Tribal Fusion ads we currently run.