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).
I have found it works very well with Digg traffic – but don’t pull keywords for products that are relevant to the article. Instead, pull keywords that a typical Digg user would be interested in, like used laptops, cheap computer memory, etc.
The click through on AuctionAds during a big Digg was 2-3% (which is way better than AdSense on my blog!!).
my nice is no niche. It’s a personal blog. I’ve noticed that the auction ads get a lot more clicks than google ads, however, I earn much less from them. In other words, lots of lookers, not a lot of buyers.
Oh, but the earnings per click that pay are worth a gait amount.
@Wendy…that is a very intersting thought. I have never thought to segment readers in that way.
I have found that the CTR using the Auction Ads URL converter is huge for me. (I use these links in my RSS Feed from TLA)
I also find that the last day of the month is my largest earner. I am not sure if Ebays payment schedule, which requires new accounts to make a bid or purchase within 30 days, has anything to do with that but it has been that way every month.
Any thoughts on how I could better utilize this system?
Not using Auction Ads yet but I want to … the concept behind it is great. But I have no blog “for” it. As pointed out, but worth mentioning again, because so many don’t seem to get the picture … ads will do well if they are relevant. Using Wendy’s example … if I read her blog and am attracted to an article on productivity … and see an ad for an external disk drive I’ve been thinking about, chances are very good I’m gonna click then and there … while the thouht is in my mind. If I read someone else’s blog with a discussion regarding “commenters” versus “commentators” (not necessarily a bad discussion), I am unlikely to “see” the same disk drive deal.
If you want to make money from _any_ ad program, you need to be writing something related/relevant to the likely ads.
I’ve been using AuctionAds (and its Shoemoneyads predecessor) since day one to monetize some of my sites. From my experience, the value and effectiveness of AuctionAds as a monetization solution depends heavily on your niche. If you are focusing on a tight niche with high resale / collector values, you can do well with AuctionAds. Think hobbies.
One other thing to remember: occasionally your users may purchase something exceptionally large through Ebay while your cookie is still set in their cache. Through the regular Commission Junction Ebay affiliate program, I’ve heardof cases where a user has purchased a car, yielding a $500 commission….
One concern, though – Shoemoney (Jeremy Schoemaker from http://www.shoemoney.com) runs AuctionAds. Although I have a lot of respect for Shoemoney, he is very opportunistic. One concern is that he has all your niches open to him, with complete conversion rates and all that.
How many ad networks/services are there?…
Following my last post where I questioned the value of building an ad engine for my own purposes, I began…
We’ve been turning AA on and off for a while now and our result isn’t that impressive. In order to be success with AA, not only you have to have a extremely relevant niche, decent traffic (at least 1 visit per every ten minutes to make sure the AD showing is targeted.), also a little bit luck and lots of patience. You need a niche that is that has high demand of course and a decent price tag. (Something above $100 at least)
It has huge potential IMO once they can ALWAYs show targeted AD and set cookie for 30 days.
AuctionAds has been working AWESOME for us. We have a great golf oriented website and just no way to monetize it. Auctionads was a true blessing in disguise! For April we made over 25,000.00$
I have a friend who says that it works pretty well, of course he runs a tech review blog, so understandably his clickthrough is pretty high. He’s pretty optimistic about the ad system, so I think Jeremy S. did a great job in the development of this system..
I was using AuctionAds and quickly switched to Commision Junction as I figured AuctionAds simply added an extra middle man to take their cut from the commisions. Is this correct?
I made around $500 last month with auctionads on around 3 sites. Not bad, it reports very very high clickthrough rates which seem to throw the EPC way off.
I rate them, they pay right on time too. No waiting around for 90 days like some affiliate companies.
Incase what I said above doesn’t make sense I will explain further. From what I have read at digital point I got the picture that AuctionAds simply used Commission Junction for tracking the sales which must mean that both AuctionAds and Commission Junction. While Commission Junction Does not have the facility to place live auctions or listings on your site, Ebay Affiliates has has a toolkit where they can be created and all you need to do is enter your Commission Junction ID number to link it to your account.
Sorry if I am way off the mark here as I have only been messing around with this for a week now!
I earned a lot more than expected with AuctionAds the past couple of months, but that is mainly because their tracking feature is so messed up.
I was told I had earned a certain amount last month, but then a much larger Paypal payment came through at the end of the month.
I had AuctionAds on my site for about a month, but just took them off because I found some of the ads rather sleazy. Not the fault of AuctionAds, I realize. But when visitors to my site see ads that feature scantily clad women advertising some sort of ebook, it doesn’t reflect well on my site. Somehow a text ad in poor taste is easier to ignore than a photo ad in poor taste.
As with any ad network (like AdSense, Chitika or YPN) Auction Ads works differently on different sites and blogs. I have it on three of my blogs and it out performs anything else that I have tried. In total it is bringing in over $5000 a month for me and has enabled me to go full time with my web site development.
What niches am I targeting? You’re dreaming if you think I’ll tell you but each of the blogs that I have them on are fairly small niches that are product related. Two have a second hand or antique aspect to them and the other has the type of product that people sell new on eBay for fairly big dollars.
It is well worth signing up for and testing.
MotorsportBabesAU – from what I understand you will earn as much if not more from AA as with CJ for a couple of reasons:
1. they give you 100% of the earnings
2. because all AA users are using ebay together they have the potential to earn more than if they did it alone (ie ebay has a higher payout when higher numbers of conversions happen). This means over time as they recruit more and more publishers the earnings should continue to increase – at least that’s how I understand it.
I’ve just added the code on my site, though I absolutely agree with Babara that it does generate some sleazy ads. No earnings yet but I’m still monitoring it for a month or so before deciding if I should take it off the site.
Ellesse
I use Auction Ads for one of my blogs and I’m pleasantly surprised by the results. It’s not my biggest money maker, but it’s not my lowest, either. I wasn’t sure if it would work with my “niche” but it did and it does. No complaints here and so far no sleazy ads.
Deb Ng
My gardening website didn’t monetize very well. A decent number of clickthroughs but zero buys so I “made” .62 in the two months as a result of the distribution caused by the reporting problems. I’ve discontinued it as I make more from adsense in that space.
@ Barbra Sundquist : Due to their net-0 terms and the time it takes to reconcile, earnings from the last day of the month go onto the next month. This might explain the difference.
As for my own experience, I have placed the ads in spots where I had no adsense yet and I saw that the click throughs are double what I get per day. The revenue is lower of course (1/6th of my adsense revenue) than adsense, but my site is targetted on cd’s, music etc. so it makes sense. Nevertheless, it’s good extra money for doing virtually nothing and I have the impression that my readers actually are glad with the service.
I can only imagine what it gives as result on more higher classed product related websites.
Yeah the main reason for running with Auction Ads rather than directly through CJ is because you immediately come in at a higher tier of commission due to the number of other users on the AA network.
I’ve just started using it on one of my sites so haven’t really got any accurate data. The only thing I’ll say, though, is that getting relevant ads isn’t as easy as it could be. With the current system, you create your list of keywords and AA presents what it considers to be relevant ads. In more cases than not, certainly in my niche, it returns unsuitable ads. A better system, IMHO, would be to use the eBay product catgegory list to seed the ads.
I like AuctionAds and people can make a lot of money from it but again how much it depends on how good are you with ideas and your “own niche” . I am in developing stage where I will only do Auction Ads :)
I don’t use it yet, but have to first plan my approach with it.
After reading the comments above, it’s a no brainer that a non niche website will not convert well as opposed to a targeted niche website.
The internet is way too full of generalizations, web surfers have realized that. With any ad network the case should be the same, optimize your site for your niche as the money is right next to it.
[…] Auction Ads – Reader ReviewsI 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 … […]
As a result of this post, we’re trying it out on our site (an automotive photo/video hosting site). I really like the ability to pick and choose keywords so that we can generally predict what our users are going to see.
Programs like Commmission Junction haven’t worked for us in the past due to their broad targeting ability (at least related to the automotive links they provide). For us, we are able to target ads down to the year, make, and model of vehicle content visitors are viewing on our site. So, if somebody is looking at a 1992 Ford Mustang picture or video, we can serve up 1992 Ford Mustang auction links via the AuctionAds system.
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.
I have an eBay affiliate with CJ and do very well with it, wasn’t really keen on splitting the money with someone else, but have been pleased with how they perform. I have them on my photo forum and blog, the photography forum does much better (established 4+ year old community), but overall I’m happy with them.
My only complaint is that they payout via PayPal, which rips you close to 3%.
Auction Ads did not work well on my web hosting related tutorial website when using “web hosting” as the main keyword. ZERO income. I removed it for now, but might play with it on another website.
What keywords do you think would work well on a web hosting related website where users already have hosting?
Oh, it looks working pretty well. I will check out the auction ads option.
just curious.. has anyone ever experienced earning reduction in AuctionAds? Because on May 2nd, I saw that my April’s earning is $90 less. When I told AA about this issue, they say there’s nothing wrong with their system.
I’ve been using since they were announced. They’re easy to use and give your blog some more contextual content. didn’t earn much until now. Yesterday I implemented it on 3 more blogs. One one of them I’m going to try that people bid on used hybrid cars. I might have some luck.
yes, i saw a 20 dollar reduction as well. I guess a problem in the reporting?
My net worth is precisely $1.19 more than when I started using Auction Ads.
I am getting more clicks than on normal google ads, but I have made 19 cents so far. I don’t know which to put in my main sidebar slot. I get more clicks from auction ads, but each click is worth Zero. It’s hard to guage what is the best choice…
I’m coming from a completely different position than a lot of the bloggers here, I have a wordpress.com account and a small niche, making monetizing very difficult.
I’ve only just added AA to my blog, but I am delighted that there is an option to create plain html links – something that is necessary for wordpress.com users. they aren’t as fancy but I can get very specific with my results. I specialize in nude art so I have added converted AA links to searches for nude art and pin-up art. I have tailored the look to flow nicely with my site, and have thumbnails for each section (as well as one for my own art on a different site- can you blame me?).
It’s an experiment, and now at least I have an option for monetization that I didn’t have before. thanks for the heads up!
Auctionads performed surprisingly well for me on a financial website. I threw them in the bottom in the place of a banner that no one was clicking. It looks like a good idea to try them on some more sites. I hope they add a check withdrawal option soon, because paypal is not an option for some of us.
I’ve been missing the boat on this one! I went in this morning and added AA to my 3 blogger blogs and when I get home tonight, I’ll add it to my wordpress Craft blog.
Hey, I figure it can’t hurt!
Bev
[…] AuctionAds before, but I didn’t really think about it too much until I read more about it at ProBlogger. Mainly reading the comments and seeing how some people have been really successful with […]
Woo Hoo! Dinner and drinks on Busy Mom! ;)
I have been using AuctionAds for a few days and so far it’s been performing well for me on 1 of my blogs that is not product related. CTR is way better compared to Adsense.
Well,auction ads got a new member. :)
If you are interested in exotic sport cars,check my blog.
See ya.
I’ve used auction ads for a month now and though they are not my largest source of income, they are better than a lot I have used. I will continue to use them as long as the cash keeps coming in.
Cheers for answering my questions Darren. Now it makes sense! I knew that there must be something I was missing.
Wow all these comments have been particularly useful and I have found myself visiting a lot of peoples sites and learned a lot. Thank you all!
after reading them i was woundring how well they will perform for a Tech related site, up till today i’ve been using eMiniMall and they were extreamly bad – i’ve registered but i couldnt have logged it,
i wounder if they are not accepting any new users at the moment
or maybe just having trouble with their Mail server as i didnt recive any email from them.
I am not using AA but the eBay affiliate through CJ. I did not know this was available till someone pointed this out during a discussion of AA.
There is a cost to run AA but they are paying 100%. I think you have to look at this seriously and realize you are selling your stats for your niche. For those here who where worried about sharing your niche here, someone far more dangerous to your business has all the information already. Get ready to compete.
[…] days with regard to revenues. Darren Rowse posted an account from an anonymous blogger who had just received a payment from them that was bigger than anything he’d previously earned from a blog. Other bloggers […]
[…] days with regard to revenues. Darren Rowse posted an account from an anonymous blogger who had just received a payment from them that was bigger than anything he’d previously earned from a blog. Other bloggers […]
[…] couple of days ago I asked readers for their reviews of AuctionAds – a new income stream for bloggers that has been going for two months […]
I signed up yesterday to try it out (should have waited a day and made $5.)
It didn’t work out too good for my site. It didn’t display the kind of ads I requested. I requested laptop ads. It showed stuffed animals, sapphire rings, and some Chinese VHS movie. Even after refreshing the page several times, the ads were still just random ones.
So I switched that space back to Amazon ads.
In fairness, AuctionAds says it’s intended for sites that get at least one visitor every 10 minutes (so info about your site remains in its cache or something). My site only gets about 10 visitors per day. Something to keep in mind if you’ve got a low-volume site.
After the initial month of not much revenue, income from Auction ADs started to grow from 2nd month onwards. Look pretty promissing. I would recommend those who have just installed Auction ADs to run it for a longer period before deciding to keep the code on your site.