I did an experiment for the last month or so on this blog. I’d been using Google Ads and while not making any outrageous income, I was averaging about $X a day, which means every couple of months, I got a check for X-dollars. Since it was basically set-it-and-forget-it, it was a nice surprise and maybe a dinner out when the check came in.
Then I saw some posts on Shopping Ads, claiming they were getting multiple times what they had gotten on Google Ads. Sounded good. I signed up. I figured if I made close to $60 in the first month, i would be happy. More than that would be great. Shopping Ads is not context based. You have to put in your own tags. I tried to put in all kinds of tags that would appeal to readers of my blog. But still it seemed that most of the ads were pretty off topic. Because I put “flash” for example, I got a lot of photography stuff and memory chip stuff. So right off the bat, it seems like something you have to work at and tweak to get it right.
The first thing I noticed when I signed into the admin console was that I had a $25 signup bonus. Nice! I was almost half way there on my first day. But really, I had to disregard that in the long run, as it’s a one time thing. I won’t be getting that every month. I needed to make $60 above and beyond that to meet my goal.
The other thing about Shopping ads is that it has two modes – pay per click and pay per action. Pay per click means you get money each time someone clicks on an ad. Pay per action means they click an ad, go to whatever site, and they actually buy something, sign up for something, etc. Pay per click is only available in the US and Canada. Furthermore, all accounts start out as pay per action only. “High traffic” sites may eventually be upgraded to premium pay per click accounts. This can happen “within hours” or “many weeks”. This is pretty vague. What is “high traffic”? Who decides? Basically they can keep you on the cost per action plan for as long as they want.
I was averaging about 10,000 impressions and about 9 clicks per day, which means in just over a month, I racked up over 300,000 ad impressions for them. But apparently this is not “high traffic”. Again, I don’t know what I’d have to do to become a high traffic site. 500,000? 1,000,000? With no goal to shot for, there’s no incentive. Or maybe I do have high traffic, but just didn’t wait through enough of the “many weeks”.
So what did I make?
Beyond the startup bonus, a grand total of $17.22. Most of this occurred on a single day, where I made $14.97. I guess someone bought something big that day. On four other days I earned $0.05, $0.99, $1.07, and $0.14. The rest of the days, $0.00.
So, I’m back to Google. The worst part is that there is a minimum payment threshold of $50, which I am $8 away from. But since I’ve only made a dollar or so in the last three weeks, It could take me the rest of 2008 to get up to the 50. I’ll cut my losses an run. They got 300,000 impressions, hundreds of clicks and at least six purchases for free. I’m out the amount I would have made if I’d stuck with Google. Oh well.
Maybe others have had better luck, but I can’t recommend it.