Adsense vs. Affiliate Programs

Made a discovery today that made me feel like a dunce, but thought I'd share it anyway, in case it prevents someone else from being a dunce.

One of my very first websites was a small, poorly designed, slightly seo'd site that existed to sell an affiliate software. It did ok, and by ok, i mean it made me around $300/month. Not great, but I was happy about it. Over time, I created more sites and eventually kind of forgot about that site. At some point during that time, I added Adsense ads to the site.

Months went by, a year or more went by, and I never really noticed that I was no longer making any affiliate sales. My concentration was on other sites. Yesterday, on a whim, I took the adsense ads off of the site. Guess what? I've made two affiiliate sales today (which is about $100 commission). I hadn't made a single sale in at least a year, and one day after removing adsense, I make two sales.

Hmmmm.....

Oh, and btw, my adsense revenue over that time period was maybe a couple dollars a month.

I have several other old sites that I have neglected, and that are in the same situation as the one above, that I will be re-evaluating now. I may be removing adsense from those sites as well, to see if the affiliate sales increase for them. I'll let you know if the trend continues - either with this site - or with any others I try it on.

Anyway, it's common sense kind of stuff, but sometimes we forget to even think about it. Just thought maybe this would cause one of you to stop and think about something that might earn you a few more bucks.

Keep us posted if this is a fluke or if it continues as a trend.

I run retail sites and have adsense on most of them. I don't have it on my highest converting pages but any page that gets a lot of unqualified traffic I have adsense there to tempt the visitor. I've kept very detailed records over millions of pageview and am running about three sents of experiments right now.

Adsense can definietly damage your sales. On average conversion pages I normally have it at the bottom where visitors will see it if they scroll waaayyyy down. I figure that I get a chance to sell at TopPage and will take a piece of a competitors ad budget if the visitor scrolls down.

On high traffic pages where conversion rate is low because of unqualified traffic I give adsense better exposure. But the idea that I like the best is to have SSI above the fold and use adsense there to reduce my sales significantly when I am out of town or busy and don't have time to respond to the normal number of customers. It's almost like renting your site out to a competitor at a moment's notice.

As they say on Wall Street...it doesn't matter where you've been, it's where you're going. So, getting a few hundred more dollars a day is a great step in the right direction!

When Adsense revenue started to fall precipitously for me in Q4 of 2004, I yanked it...glad I did.

Cygnus

Thanks DD !

This brought to mind a neglected site of my own.
It was a slap-job, DB driven with affiliate links on the home page.
I put AdSense on the interior pages for content with Y! and MSN as the target SEs.

300 uniques a day generates $3 a day adsense.
I am going to push adsense to the end of page (good point EGOL) and feature my own rotating aff ads under the header.
That should kick it up a bit.

Cool, 4Comparison, let us know how that works out for you too.

I don't know why it'd make you feel like a dunce; you just re-discovered this old site and made a change that made you some money. Maybe you expect you to know all and be all, but I've got lower expectations for myself, and see that as a nice discovery.

I very much enjoy reading of the psychology of ad placement and how small tweaks here and there make such a difference.

I don't know its probably differenet with differenet sites, plus how crooked the affialte is.

I have some aws sites that probably wouldn't pay for their bandwidth without the adsense.

Great post dazzlindonna and a good reminder to all. (In fact I may use this post for "blog fodder" next week.) Almost everyone has forgotten about a site or left it on auto-pilot. I think a very common mistake many affiliates make is to focus on the new sites and overlook the potential of sites (assets) they already have out there.

Everyone else has made some good points in this thread too. The key is really TESTING. If you have an affiliate program that CONVERTS & PAYS then don't siphon off potential sales for nickel Adsense clicks. If you have good traffic pages without a good affiliate program, then by all means use Adsense on those. Test and measure to see which ads will best monetize the ASSET you invested time and energy in when you built that site.

I have an affiliate that was complaining about a lack of sales in one of our HIGHEST converting programs, that pays commissions on baby jogging strollers and car seats which have a HIGG average order size of around 300. When I looked at his site Adsense was on top - then about 5 big paragraphs of content, then the jogging strollers datafeed was WAYYYY down below the fold. Considering that when a consumer clicks ad Adsense ad they leave your site, no wonder he wasn't making more sales.

So test and measure and taking into account affiliate conversions, commission and average order size before you put Adsense at the top of the page.

Congrats on the software sales Donna.
Hope they continue!

Why do you think removing adsense resulted in two sales the next day? Was it just because you think all the traffic you were getting were just reading/clicking on the ads and getting redirected before looking at your site? If so I'd have thought you'd be getting more than a couple of dollars a month from it....?

Burrow, the traffic is very light to the site, so its very likely that the few visitors it was getting was clicking on the ads. This is an extreme niche. Not too many people looking for this.

DD, I just brought up 50 pages of affiliate pages that have a AdLinks in the header and AdSense in the footer with primarily affiliate content. I am going to let them fly for a while then remove the AdLinks as an experiment. They are just getting going but placing well in SERPs with just the beginnings of CTR. I will need 60-90 days of data before I make the switch. I will let everyone know what I find.

This is a thread for everyone to bookmark or add to furl.

Furl this and check it daily
http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?p=207329
This is simple but very powerful stuff that is being posted here.

Great thread!

I just realized that this is the exact reason why my sales could be down on one of my smaller sites. Im going to take down adsense from the top and see what happens.

Matt

On the other hand, to say that people are adding AdSense to retail sites is saying a lot about AdSense revenue and how much people make from it.

Hey guys,

Just thought I would post a few early test resuts. I know its a bit early to noticea definite trend however over the last two days I have made 9 sales from this small site I have up. This is after taking adsense down.

I usually made on average 1 sale a day and I got a number of adsense clicks.

I will see if this trend continues. Right now, I am glad I took