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.
Thanks for sharing Keith. Text-Link-Ads (TLA) is the only real money I’ve made through advertising.
FYI, Google’s Terms of Service forbids you from sharing how much you earn from Adsense, and they enforce this rule.
Thanks Josh. I edited to remove explicit statements about how much I made. I left in the Shopping Ads stuff, which probably has similar rules, but I’m not worried about losing my contract. If they threaten to sue me, I’ll take that down.
Tried ShoppingAds too, and same experience here…gonna take it down when I have some time.
Try feedburner.net, it’s bought by Google and you can put ads into your feeds. Pretty cool. To bad my adsense account got banned, couldn’t try it out myself.
I had a similar experience, my Shopping Ads took off in January and February, but I’ve seen a steady decrease.
Okay, by ” Steady” I mean like a rock dropped.
Right now they are about tied with Kontera and nothing even near Adsense.
I can’t say I’ve had anything but good luck with shopping ads. If your website is highly product oriented its pretty easy to make some money with shopping ads. However, I dislike how vague they are with the cpc and cpa program. I’ve also rummaged through their website and cannot find anything that says how much their commission rate is. I remember seeing it when I first signed up, and that it used to be 100%. What worries me is that they may have changed it, considering that they updated their terms of agreement and removed any indications of how much they commission.
Or maybe I just can’t find it?
i´m stuck at 48.80 $ for month now. before that, i made the 48.80$ in a few days. shoppingads smells like scam
They’ve now restructured and without ANY notice are cutting affiliates off.
We were cut off for having a low volume without ANY notice and when I went to their site there was a message not to contact support so I have NO recourse to ask what would constitute enough volume. I had one of their ads running and darn well better get ALL the money generated from traffic and sales.
Thankfully I’m already an EPN affiliate to so I’ll just switch the shoppingads I was running to straight eBay widgets… I’m doing better with theirs anyway and with a lot less trouble loading.
My advice to someone considering ShoppingAds.. don’t bother. There are lots of others that work better, are more ethical and will make you more money.
Shoppingads doesn’t pay! Think twice when you signin in this scam network. I have received from ShoppingAds NO MONEY. And now I send emails but …..
Fake network.
Run away
They cut me off too. They said that “YOU WILL BE PAID” but it was 2 months ago and guess what?! They have NOT sent anything yet. Shame!
They cut me off too. But they did pay me the next month.
If you can, try contacting someone there.
Stay well clear of Shoppingads they will scam your earnings trust me. I had evidence of members purchases bought via click through and no commission was paid. When I enquired through a support ticket it was never answered.
The Shoppingads support is probably the same as the Auctionads was, NON EXISTENT you might as well send the email to a monkey, no change that a monkey might try and at least answer it!!
Alao read the TOS very carefully 10X over because this scammer will wait till you have built up $50-60 and then ban your account with the TOS as the excuse. Again if you contact support NOTHING!!
The more people realise the bad practices of this outfit the better, also I think it would be a good idea to complain to ebay and commision junction about how this PIRATE treats his clients.