Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Which is the most sustainable
Which doesn't piss off users
Which brings in the best bottom line
Which is easier to manage
The reason i'm asking is because i've been running adsense for a year with good effect, peaking at around $100's a day across the site. This month i ran a small test at the bottom of a fairly busy equipment based page with links through an affiliate scheme to a shop. This has been up 20 odd days and made me £32 which is far more than the page makes in adsense (which is also running on there).
Should i push the site down the affiliate route or continue down the adsense (or a happy medium)
Cheers,
hughie
I have been doing that for a while now, although my affiliate hasnt come close to adsense. I would love to know which other affiliate your happy with. fell free to PM if you feel kind today. :)
Why not use both? Experiment with different placement and different programs on each page and see which works best. You may find that AdSense works best on some pages while a relevant affiliate program works better on other pages.
Are you talking about monetizing a "content site"? If so, you may be able to profit nicely with both AdSense and affiliate links, depending on your topic.
Are you talking about a pure affiliate site or a made-for-AdSense site? If so, you'll need to determine which business model will be sustainable for the longer time. (That's anybody's guess.)
What you need to do is set up your site with both contextual ads and affiliate ads--test each one to see which does better for you.
On some sites I have there are no affiliate ads available anywhere so I have to rely on Adsense. But, on other sites I have there's no one bidding on Adwords so there would never be any Adsense ads.
Test several options and keep testing until you're happy with the performance.
I'm sure doing both is going to benefit me the most, but i don't want to detract one from the other, particularly if the quality of sale generated is going to continue to pay like it has.
I often find adsense puts me off websites, especially if it's "in your face" and some nicely placed banners or deep linking is a much more discrete way of doing things.
I'm lucky as this sector is potentially a high-value purchase sector which seems to lend itself to affiliate schemes.
ta,
hughie
Its a content based site, not a "buy this/buy that" which is why i'm suprised with the response as i've certainly not forced the affiliate links on anyone (which may be the reason it's worked...)
I think it's a "trust issue": With so much sleaze on the Web (and the Internet in general), some (many?) buyers gravitate toward sites that they trust, whether those sites are brand-name "e-tailers" or content sites with affiliate links.
On my own site, I earn more from affiliate bookings than from AdSense, but AdSense does a great job of "filling the gaps" with contextual ads on pages about topics that don't drive affiliate traffic.
Although as site like yours is probably more likely to very well through booking leads and so forth..
buyers gravitate toward sites that they trust, whether those sites are brand-name "e-tailers" or content sites with affiliate links.
That's dead-on. I have a couple of purely e-commerce sites that don't have much in the way of educational content... really just meant to push sales. Then I have several other sites that are content-rich and are meant to inform or educate more than makes sales. Lots of articles on the latter type of sites. I find that those content sites get higher CTR and make much more adsense money than the e-commerce sites. But to my surprise (at least initially), the content sites even outsell the e-commerce sites through the affiliate links I have on them. I'd advise you to keep both adsense and your affiliate links, but test placement positions. You can see the trend very quickly, so no change should hurt you for more than a few days if it's a dud. I've been surprised many times by a seemingly small placement change that ended up yielding significantly higher adsense CTR and/or affiliate sales.
most schemes operate something like this: 'if they come back and buy something within 30days of clicking your link then we'll pay you a share'
that means that all you have to do is get them interested enough to click the link... pretty much the same thing as what you have to do with adsense.
Where I have both Amazon and Adsense on a page, Amazon goes first (an AWS-generated 728x90 block on top of a 728x90 leaderboard, at the bottom of the page).
