Pixelrage.net

In using Google AdSense, AdBrite or any of the others – there are cases where it makes no sense to put ad blocks a website. Know when, where and how ads will leech off of the commissions you could and should be making!

As I’ve mentioned before, I made my start as an affiliate marketer in 2007 with Build A Niche Store. It’s basically a mini-CMS that puts together a ready-to-go eBay Partner Network affiliate store. So many affiliates on the forums kept making the same suggestion as to where AdSense ads should be placed. From day one, even with no experience in affiliate marketing, I knew this was dead wrong. Why on earth would you ever want to place an ad on a site whose purpose is to sell stuff? Here are some issues with this scenario:

1. Crappy payout: We all complain about AdSense‘s penny, nickel and dime clicks. Given that knowledge, wouldn’t you rather sell something and make $2.50 (or $50, etc.) commission rather than getting somewhere between 0-10 ads clicked for the day, and making less than a dollar? I’m speaking hypothetically, but I would be hard pressed to believe an affiliate site is going to get ranked high enough in the system to warrant regular, high-paying clicks from a PPC program. The only real money that transpires in PPC is when someone specifically targets your site to place their ads on it. Nobody is going to do this with an affiliate site running AdSense.
2. No residual benefit: PPC ads pay you when they’re clicked. There’s no cookie dropped, so, nothing that happens after the fact. That’s why affiliate marketing is better. You’ll at least get the credit for any additional purchases that happen after a click.
3. Helping your competitors: Borrowing from the last sentence from point #1 — by putting PPC ads on your site, you are essentially driving traffic away from your site (and all of the potential sales that may have transpired) and onto the site of a competitor. Affiliate marketers all dabble in AdWords. Why would you give them the satisfaction of appearing on your site ads?
4. Overcrowding your website: Ads give no value to storefront sites beyond crowding up their interface. The last thing you want to do is make your storefront more cluttered. The whole point is to get that one “ready to buy” person to click your affiliate link, and let their credit card do the rest. Why disrupt that flow with PPC ads that will pay chump change?

I’m not putting down PPC publisher ads at all: AdSense is a must-have money making component for text only sites and article sites. That’s where the real payoff is. It’s just an awful match for any site selling or or promoting actual products.

The mistake so many people make is that they instinctively think that AdSense = more chances to make money on top of the affiliate links that are already on the site. It’s the most careless, un-strategic way to think. The funniest thing about it is that all of the newbs who ask for advice in the “critique my site” section of these forums are all doing it, and they’re also the ones complaining about low paying AdSense clicks and poor sales.

Ironic? I think not.