What's the status of Referral ads?

[farmboy]

This topic seems to have died. Has everyone pretty much given up on the concept? A prior ASA used to encourage people to give PPA a chance but I haven't seen much of that urging lately.

Side Note: Yesterday, for the first time in weeks, I checked to see what PPA ads were available. One advertiser was selling a product costing several thousand dollars. If you refer someone to the seller and the person makes a purchase, the seller will pay you the outstanding commission of 73 cents! That was the best laugh I had yesterday.

FarmBoy

[andrewshim]

Referrals were doing really great a couple of months back. Now, they suck. I've taken them off and given the space to affiliating.

[purplecape]

I've tried them twice and been disappointed both times. Now I see more ads available that would work for my site, I may test again.

I suspect that for them to be worthwhile, several factors all have to align--availability, reasonable definitions of a "conversion," match with your content, the phase of the moon, etc.

[koan]

Last time I tried, they still showed referrals that I didn't select even though I clicked on the option to just show those that are on my list. Considering I had personal objections to those that are shown (1 cent commission for a product I hated), I consider myself "burned" on referrals and won't touch it for a big while.

The nice thing about referrals was being able to manually select the products instead of going the contextual route, a nice complement to CPC contextual ads. Now if that doesn't even work...

I liked the idea though of using Google to find and manage referrals for a site instead of registering with other companies individually.

[netmeg]

Maybe now that they've got this Doubleclick thing going, that will change. I gave up on them as they are now.

[Scurramunga]

Had a look at the new referal setup and I must say it does look improved. I am still wary about how conversions are (not) policed.

[andrewshim]

availability, reasonable definitions of a "conversion," match with your content, the phase of the moon, etc.

availability is a definite problem. The last time I tried them, the only way to tell when an advertisers' ad wasn't available was there would be a big hole on your page. Some ads were really converting well for me, but when they weren't available, they were replaced with really off-target ads that I never approved in the first place.