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A lot of bloggers use AdSense to monetize their sites, and you can definitely make good money from it. Sometimes you have content that is difficult to monetize in any other way and the AdSense links blend in to provide you some revenue.
However, there are definitely down sides to using AdSense to monetize your blog as compared to affiliate marketing. Here’s a great example that I ran into on one of my own sites this week.
When AdSense Doesn’t Work
I wrote a blog post a long time ago about Champagne of the Month Clubs. It was a great post when I had a merchant who sold Champagne of the Month Clubs and was worthy of promoting. Since the time I wrote that post, the merchant stopped selling the clubs and I was unable to find a good replacement that converted. Because of that, we added an AdSense block to the post.
In reviewing AdSense revenue the other day, Eric and I realized that we were making NOTHING from the block on the post despite a fair amount of traffic. How could that be? I went to look at the post and saw this:
In the middle of my post about Champagne was an ad for Sears Parts Direct. And not just an ad but a totally random picture of a part called a Transaxle that I am not sure that I have ever seen or would ever buy.
If you know anything about AdSense, you know that a big part of their ads involve retargeting. That is, they will show you an ad for a site that you were previously on. If it had just so happened that I was on a site that sold wine clubs the day before, I may have gotten lucky and seen a picture of wine here and it would have looked great and maybe even made me a couple of pennies. But as is often the case with retargeting, the ad that is on your page will have absolutely nothing to do with the content of your page or site.
Sometimes AdSense is just plain ugly!
There ARE ways to ensure that you get better ads on your site through AdSense, but that is a post for another day and involves a lot of things that, quite frankly, won’t apply to a lot of my readers. There are a lot of settings involved as well as ensuring that you have a good deal of traffic. I’m not saying never use AdSense!
But if you were just planning on throwing some AdSense around your site and making money off of it, you might want to take a close look at how much you are making versus how it looks on your site to decide if sticking with affiliate links would be better for you.
What Was My Solution?
In this case we decided that the look of our site and the feel of our review pages was more important than the few pennies we might (might!) make off of the AdSense. Our ultimate goal is to sell wine clubs, not make pennies on the dollar with display or clickthru ads. So I removed the AdSense, created a new custom image with Picmonkey, and we are negotiating with the replacement merchant to figure out how to make the affiliate links convert better.
What’s the point of all of this, Tricia?
First, you should be checking analytics. You know how many people view your pages. You know how much you are making per view using AdSense or per click with your affiliate links.
Second, like Jessie J says, “It ‘s not about the money, money money.” Okay, maybe it is. But when you look at the big picture of your site and how you earn revenue, you have to figure out whether certain ads are not worth the money because they are causing you to lose other potential revenue.
Lastly, I’m using my own site as an example, but I’ve seen the same thing on a lot of your sites. I see what you are posting to make money with and question whether it is worth it considering the overall effect of how it makes your site look and function. Look hard at your numbers and figure out if your particular monetization strategy is worth it.
Are you a fan of AdSense? Do you use it because it makes you a lot of money or because you don’t know a better way to monetize?
Hello Tricia,
Affiliate programs in my opinion has the best potential to make the most money. Most Internet marketers choose affiliate programs over AdSense for this reason. Finding individual Affiliate programs have only one benefit over ads networks. Since you are going to the source and not through a second party you can get paid more for the same task, but it will require more work on your end.
While I don’t know Kimberly I do know AdSense – having been with the program since the get-go. 🙂
Kimberly’s plan of attack is a good plan and should work well. I have been doing exactly that, but in a different vertical, for several years.
Example: I have “real estate” site (Disclaimer: I am not a Realtor nor do I work in the real estate business) for a local resort town that simply shows quality images, with descriptions, of a couple hundred condominium buildings. On the building pages I use only AdSense and find that a 160×600 in the right margin and a 300×250 above the building descriptions work very well. On pages with items for decorating a condo or enjoying time on the beach we use affiliate links within the body of the narrative. But we keep the AdSense on the right edge of the page. During the height of the season (real estate season here lasts over six months) we earn over $500 per month with AdSense. And that’s from what is basically a hands-off site.
Keep in mind, however, that real estate ads do not pay “pennies” per click. We find that some of them are quite lucrative.
I’m trying to figure this out. For now, I am going to start off by having the AdSense ads in my header and sidebar while keeping relevant affiliates in the content/post areas. I’ll see how it goes…
I think that is a good way to go, Kimberly. In particular, when you have the AdSense in places where people would EXPECT to see an ad rather than seeing content, I think it is less likely to make the site look weird. The picture of a transaxle in the middle of a wine post was definitely not a place customers would expect to see something like that!