I want to show you a couple of screenshots. The first on the left is from one of my ClickBank accounts. The sales it shows relate to 1 product that I’ve been promoting recently from 1 page on 1 of my websites. The image to the right of it shows the statistics for that page from Google analytics.
On the left hand side we have over $67 in income, on the right hand side we have only 10 unique visitors to that page and despite having no less than 3 Adsense blocks on it a total earnings of $0.01 with Adsense! This is why I regret ever using Adsense!
Let me explain in a little more detail about that page.
1. It only ranks for 1 long tail, not very popular search phrase (hence the lack of traffic)
2. It contains about 400 words, is not a product/service review and is nothing more than some opinion about general nerdy stuff.
3. The Adsense takes up about 30% of the screen on loading.
4. The only affiliate links are 2 plain text links within the body of the page content, neither are disguised in anyway nor in bold etc
Yet with all that Adsense my affiliate links have made 10X more income in 1 month than what Adsense has made from that page in 2 years! It’s a pattern I see over and over. Every single time I take the time and effort to source a good fitting affiliate product for a page I see returns that smash Adsense. If somebody offered to pause time and allow me to work on 1 thing until completion without disruptions or distractions the 1 thing I would choose to do would be to go back through every webpage I’ve ever published and remove the Adsense and add 1 or 2 affiliate links for RELEVANT products. I’m positive that if I did this I would never have to worry about money again.
Adsense always has been a numbers game, you need a lot of targeted traffic to see good returns. It’s very quick to implement and because it targets itself to your content it does perform better than any other PPC service I’ve ever used. But, and it’s a big but, no matter how much money you are making with Adsense there is always the likelihood that if you took the time to source your own “adverts” (affiliate links) for your content that you could be making much more. Even as I type this now I’m trying to thing back and remember if I have any pages where the Adsense out earns my affiliate offers, you know what, I can’t think of a single one!
11 Responses to “Why I Regret Ever Using Adsense”
Thai Trinh
May 29, 2009
Even if adsense doesn’t make you as much money, you said it took you more time to come up with affiliate material. Does the time spent messing with affiliate material vs. the nearly autopilot adsense ratio make up for the revenue dip of adsense?
Thai Trinh’s last blog post..Moisture damaged iphones
|Paul B
May 29, 2009
That affiliate product took half an hour of searching around to find, for me it’s a no brainer. What Adsense has going for it is that it’s just so convenient to use, but as with just about everything in life the more you put in the more you get out.
I have another example of this from a much more popular page. It averages around $5 a day with Adsense from a thousand or so uniques – I put an affiliate product on it 6 months ago and within a week had made over $400 – the best day I’ve had on that page it made over $450! Some days it blanks but that’s just the game. No way does it work like that all the time but like I said above I don’t have a single page where Adsense is outperforming a well chosen affiliate link over the long term.
|R Kumar
May 30, 2009
It is true that adsense gives nothing in terms of revenue in comparison to affiliate products. If marketed correctly, affiliate products are also an auto-pilot way of income generation. I too have found that the time, effort and space wasted on adsense can yield much better results with affiliate products, these days.
R Kumar’s last blog post..I Lost my Pagerank!
|Chris
May 30, 2009
Nice post Paul
It really makes me want to promote affiliate products but I never seem to have any success with it. Perhaps I need to choose my offers more carefully? How do you go about finding a decent product to promote?
Chris’s last blog post..Exploring the earning power of a niche site
|Jesse
May 30, 2009
Good post Paul, I have seen similar results on a few of my sites and I have started working much more on affiliate product/program placement within my content. Time will tell I guess. As far as adsense goes, I really only have one site that performs really well with it and that site is a very targeted niche with a very specific user base.. Time will tell I guess
Jesse’s last blog post..I’ll make you a blog for free, yes I said free blog
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