“Hey what’s that? A picture and a price for something? I’ve not seen that before.”

Click.

Then the magic of eBay’s user base of millions kicks in, and the 30 day cookie earns you a couple of quid.

Then, when the novelty of something different appearing on your site wears off, the CTR dives, no more money, Shoemoney cashes in in a stroke of genius, and AuctionAds goes down the pan good and proper.

More and more shopping ad alternatives keep appearing now, which I’ll write about in a sec in separate posts so that Mr Googlebot will index more of my content – and of course for ease of navigation for you, the user.

But anyway, to sum up this post…

AuctionAds – bored now.

Initially – great. AuctionAds was performing really well on my sites, making nearly as much as Adsense was, but with the bonus of my Adsense income not being effected at all. But recently things have gone a bit up the creek with AuctionAds. They had some server issues and a lot of downtime that resulted in a lot of poor stats – a poor click through rate due poor targeting of their ads. Things have continued to steadily decrease now, and today I finally decided it was time to pull AuctionAds from my sites and replace them with CJ’s Ebay program, which may not be as pretty and easy on the eye as AuctionAds, but performs much better than AuctionAds at current.

There could be light at the end of the tunnel though with AuctionAds being sold to MediaWhiz, but to be honest I can’t be bothered to wait it out several more weeks, or even months to see if things improve and waste my ads space. I’ll just keep one eye on Digital Point to see if any improvements are noted.

It’s a pretty interesting concept. AuctionAds is basically one big eBay affiliate, and allows you to place targeted eBay auction ads on your site based on keywords you select. When a user clicks on one of these ads, and makes a winning bid/action, you make money.

So far I’ve had around 100 clicks on my AuctionAds but no revenue as of yet – although it’s worth noting that many auctions last up to 10 days, so I may not see any results for a week or so.

The click through rate is certainly better than I was getting with Adsense, so we’ll just have to see how it goes. It’s worth a try though, particularly if you run a niche site and aren’t having that much success with Adsense – it’s also worth noting that you can use AuctionAds alongside Adsense as AuctionAds isn’t a contextual ad service, so it’s pretty easy to give it a go and for the trials to not influence your Adsense earnings too much.