Google Adsense vs Commision junction?

That's the question...:)

[zelator777]

Hmm...what do you think,share your experience which one is better(brings more money easily :)

CJ or the Great Adsense?

[vabtz]

Hey there :)

I have a small, even micro network, my experience and research has shown that it depends on the page your displaying the advertisement on.

There is no rule of thumb for this one. Usually for me in order for CJ to do well you have to target the page content to what ever the product is. Also you need to insure your visitors are already interested in that product.

Best of luck!

Sidenote: Cross posting forums is discouraged around here.

[zelator777]

Hi,vabtz
Yeah..it maybe really depends...:)
My personal opinion is that Adsense is better.
Although cj are not much after,because of the high paying advertisers,paying several dollars for a single user who just download a software linked from your page.
But in the real world you as a webmaster will never be that lucky :)...to achieve visitors downloading on the advertiser page(in 90% the visitor must even buy anyhing...(to get a single penny)

On the other hand,in the reality-google will pay you even if the visitor just clicks on the site and then
fall asleep on the keyboard :)
....and at the end of the month you will have:
1000$ in Adsense and 100$ in CJ

Best,

[vabtz]

I am sorry if this sounds critical but I think that is a poor way to look at things.

At the end of the day if your visitors don't convert for the merchant your going to lose money. The thing that varies, in this scenario, is the type of content needed to make both work for you not the need for the visitor to "convert" or "perform an action" for the merchant/advertisor.

[vabtz]

As a follow up I imagine your new to this.

For an education in this go to the Adwords forum and listen to the advertisors. Hear what they want. They have the money you need .. they are your customers.

[Swebbie]

It's no contest across my sites - AdSense outperforms CJ, Linkshare, Share-a-sale, or any of the others by a wide margin.

[ann]

Same here.

Adsense is the best so far.

Ann

[ferhanz]

i would definately go for Adsense as no other Advertising Program is usefull for the publishers of Asian Region.

[oddsod]

I don't see the point of the original question. There isn't one better or worse. It's horses for courses.

If there really was a clear "better" and "worse" and you are sure that Adsense is "better" -- why the poll?

[Heartlander]

Seeing as how I'm only 2 months into AS, and have never EVER drawn a sale from any of those affiliate programs...the choice is easy.
Have an eCommerce site as well that has yet to get a sale after 5,000 page impressions.
Already has somebody else's AS code on it...go figure, it's free.

[bumpski]

Adsense leans a little toward the marketing, CJ and the many other affiliate services are a little more sales oriented, you've got to help make it happen.

I had only made a few dollars here and there on CJ and then had that $428 commission for one sale, makes a big impression for a while.

Now I've got to do it again. What's amazing is I'm not actually recommending the product, I'm being honest! Sometimes it works!

[Drastic]

Depends on the topic and your methods of promotion.

On some stuff, affiliate will greatly outperm contextual. On others, contextual will work best. More on this in a bit.

[pawas]

Commission Junctions is performing far better than adsene on my side.
With adsense my average earnings per click is below than 0.06 $ per click, but with adsense my average pay per click is always higher than 2$ , i know CJ will not work well for all, but it only needs hard work to find out the proper way, though i was lucky that i had big success with the first merchant i joined on CJ. I hold a number of websites with quality traffic, I have added CJ only at 2 of my websites, now i am testing CJ on other websites also if they perform better than google, like more than 0.07$ and at least 1% ctr, then i will give CJ top position on those websites, and dump adsense on bottom of the page.
I know many advertisers earning more than 5$ per click, I am still learning and I hope to reach that amount, as of current 2$+ per click, i am satisfied with that.

[bweebco]

Wow what did you have a 428 commission on? a boat?

[jeep98]

CJ earns more than Adsense for me. Psychologically, I originally thought that Adsense would be a clear winner for my small site b/c you watch the earning tick up every few hours...but CJ wins out per click in the long run.

Like other have stated, it depends upon your model.

[FourDegreez]

CJ wins for me, too. The lesson here is that there is no lesson here. Different people will get different results.

[wellzy]

CJ by far. I can build a whole website around the CJ products, then put Adsense at the bottom of the page (in case the customer did not find what they wanted).

[rogerd]

Affiliate ads like CJ and others are best suited to targeted sites, or at least targeted pages. If you combine a strong topical site with a good affilate program, you'll probably outperform Adsense.

For less targeted sites, particularly those with a range of topics and content, Adsense is likely to do well because it will deliver appropriate ads for each page.

Adsense is just about always less work, but sometimes investing time in affiliate promotion will outperform Adsense in a big way.

[ska_demon]

Rogerd,

I agree with you completely. AS is a very easy way to 'guarantee' an income with very little work. Trouble is your income will 'top out' with AS whereas with a bit of effort Affiliate Programs 'should' out perform contextual advertising every time. IMO contextual advertising is there to provide the user with a link to whatever they are looking for if they can't find it on your site.

Sure, I could maybe earn $100 one day with contextual advertising from 100 clicks and nothing from AM. On the other hand I could make $150 from 1 loan lead on top of the 100 AS clicks. It depends on the day.

Potentially AM could blow AS sky high. It all depends on the amount of work you want to put in.

My 2 Cents

Ska

[ccam96]

I run both on my pages. Last month, I made $300 from Adsense and $3000 from CJ & other "in-house" affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs, especially pay-per-lead, are by far the best coverting and most profitable promotions. Any affiliate program that is well reviewed and recommended to your audience will always "beat the pants" off of Adsense.

JMHO of course.

[Michael Anthony]

Both are low work, high reward solutions. In my experience, aff marketing outperforms Adsense and similar by 10 to 1. Aff marketing is indeed a little harder to learn, but it's typical risk/reward stuff where more risk=more return and in most cases the risk is just time and/or PPC money if that's how you get traffic.

For SEO work, which most affs are finding is a good supplemental income but won't keep us in yachts and Bentleys, it seems that the effort required is higher and more constant. With PPC the reverse is true. There's more work at the beginning and there's an upfront cost, but this is compensated for by higher long term rewards without constant juggling as each SE changes their algo and we all play catchup.

What's even more interesting is that most high earners (say $50k/month and up) are now agreeing with me about the value of SEO - top sponsored links drive more traffic than SERPS and it converts better.

SEO has been relegated to an ego massaging game for many professional SEO's, who are often guilty of confusing rankings with success and in some cases deluding their clients into the same confusion. As anyone on here will tell you who has been there and done it, this is simply a fallacy. Traffic that doesn't convert is just a waste of bandwidth.

Ranking for a non-converting non competetive term is easy because there's no profit in it. From what I know from talking to several others, to rank for big money terms you need all your onpage and offpages to be perfect, then you need to go buy a few thousand extra inbounds to outrank your competitors who have matched your other SEO factors to perfection by reverse engineering. It becomes a game of fat wallet SEO, where the results are rarely matched by the costs.

To provide an adequate passive income from SEO alone without constant tinkering is tricky, but I doubt if any professional SEO would enlighten their clients to this fact and see thir regular monthly fees all disapear overnight. It also begs the question - if your client is paying for rankings and not sales, how can you ensure their financial survival or at least the survival of the online part of their business? You can't, which will become a problem for anyone not combining paid search with SEO in a "full service" solution.

Niches and bottom feeding from low traffic keywords will pay your gas bills, but never buy you a new house.