SEO Blogger

Since MediaWhiz bought AuctionAds, and possibly found they had a bit of a dud due to the whole novelty wearing off thing I mentioned earlier, they decided to try a bit of the “3 month’s worth of people being excited by seeing something new” approach.

ShoppingAds is a cost-per-click program, which is pretty cool, as every click will get you cash as opposed to a 30 day cookie that might not be used. The CPC seems to be around $0.20 too, which isn’t bad at all. The only problem is that (a) there’s bugger all products on there still, and (b) the ad units look identical to AuctionAds - so no novelty clicking there I’m afraid.

It’s gone down the pan really… partly due to their reporting issues, and partly due to the novelty wearing off. As with most things, when you have regular visitors to your site, your users will eventually start to become blind to things that are always there, hence the whole rotating Adsense colours theory. AuctionAds performed brilliantly for me over the few few months, most likely due to people seeing them and thinking…

“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.

I mentioned signing up to AuctionAds a while ago, and said I’d report back on it’s performance. So here’s the report.

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.

As some of you may have been informed by Google, they’re starting testing on an AdSense referral program.

Here’s the blurb from Google regarding it:

You may already be using AdSense referrals to direct your users to Google products like Google Pack or Google AdWords. Now, you can expand the earning potential of your website even further by directing users to products and services from our base of AdWords advertisers.

In just a few minutes you can hand-pick and display ads that will appeal directly to your users’ tastes and interests. After choosing relevant ads or keywords, you will be able to customize referrals units that complement the look and feel of your site. Then you can start directing visitors to the products or services you’ve selected.

With referrals, you’ll be paid when your visitors click through to an advertiser’s site and complete an action defined by your advertisers, such as a sale or sign up. Because these actions are often more involved than a simple click or impression, advertisers pay more for these referrals, which can translate into higher earnings for your site. Further, you’ll see the expected earnings and advertiser performance ahead of time, so you can make the best decisions about what to refer. You can also choose to target the keywords that will ensure you get the highest-paying referrals for your ad space.

This feature is currently available on a limited basis as part of our beta test.

After being accepted into the program, I’m not really convinced I see the point of it. The products aren’t particularly appealing - not compared to affiliate networks - and you’ve got no flexibility on how you promote these products. The ads just look like regular Adsense, so aren’t likely to get a high CTR, and the image alternatives are quite limited.

I know Google are slowly taking over the world, but affiliate networks need not be worried here!

I signed up to AuctionAds the other day, and I’ve begun trialling it on one of my sites.

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.

Backlinks. Google loves them. I don’t.

They’re a pain in the backside to build up, especially quality backlinks, and unless you want to go down the route of purchasing some high PR backlinks, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work.

Now, I’m all for shortcuts that make life easier and leave you more time to put your feet up, so I’ve been doing a bit of experimenting lately which I’m hoping I’ll find the results of when the next Google pagerank update comes along.

I’ve done quite a lot of reading up on forums and various SEO related sites about how useful Myspace backlinks actually are. The general consensus seems to be that Myspace is a brilliant marketing tool - which it definitely is - and that Myspace backlinks are practically useless.

I don’t buy that though, not yet anyway. So I’ve been doing some experimenting over the last few months on one of my sites, and I’ve delved into the world of Myspace. It didn’t take long for my site’s name and url to get around given (a) it was music based, (b) part of a small niche on the net, and (c) actually useful to a large portion of Myspace users. So with this in mind, it wasn’t long before more and more people would request to be a friend of mine, people would pick up the link to my site via my profile and share it with each other via comments on each other’s pages - and each time they’re doing that, they’re adding a backlink. In just a few months hundreds of backlinks have been created, and I could just sit back and let people do the work for me. Great stuff!

Now, I’ve no idea how this has effected the site in question’s PR yet, but what I can tell you is that it’s flown up the SERP’s and search engine traffic has increased dramatically - not to mention the extra traffic generated from people passing the site around Myspace, so the experiment has certainly been beneficial thus far.

As for increasing my PR? Well, the big argument against Myspace backlinks seems to be that they’re generally just a lot PR0’s. I have however noticed my site’s link appearing in the comments section of a few profiles with PR’s of 2-5, so they’re not all totally useless. And as I mentioned, the SERP positions have increased on a weekly basis. So now, I’m just waiting to see if that little green bar grows a little, and to find out just how many useless Myspace backlinks you need to make them useful.

I’ll keep you posted!