Amazon vs Adsense - Who will win?

[ttmschine]

There's only one way to find out - FIGHT!!!!!

Will I make more money from Amazon than the peanuts I get from Adsense?

Background:

I have a reviews type site that gets about 2500 people per month looking for reviews of a particular brand of a household product, where they'll be spending $hundreds to $thousands each time they buy.

I've been using Adsense but it's earnings are crap - e.g. 2c to 5c per day.

This is really disappointing, I've used Adsense in the past and had great results, but that was when the ads exactly matched the content of the page - so Joe Shmoe is looking for X for his house, he lands on a page about X, and he sees Adsense ads about X - so he probably clicks one of them.

Now Adsense seem to be using re-targeting - so Joe Schmoe is searching for X for his house, he lands on a page about X, and he sees Adsense ads for...... something he was looking at in the past week.

Maybe vets, or holidays, or sneakers, or some other totally different thing to the thing he's looking for RIGHT NOW - so he probably doesn't click one of those ads.

Also, since the ad is totally unrelated to the content of the site, or the search, Google probably pay you peanuts for the click, because the quality score is really low - they don't match.

More money for Google, less for you and me.

Test:

Since Adsense is performing so poorly I started looking at other ideas, and lo and behold the product is available on Amazon.

So I've chopped Adsense out, and am now promoting the actual product the person is actually looking for RIGHT NOW, via Amazon.

Did this last night, will see how it performs over a few weeks - hell, I have nothing to lose except maybe $1 in Adsense earnings or something similar LoL.

Who do you think is going to win?

Thought this might be useful for people who are trying to monetize by Adsense - there may now be much better ways?

We'll soon find out.

 

[articlewritingwork]

My vote goes to Adsense.
I have seen many people earning 30$ per 1,000 views

 

[ttmschine]

For the record I expect Amazon to win - 1 sale per month will blow Google Adsense earnings out the water.

From 2500 people looking to buy that thing, or at least on the fence and leaning towards it - I expect beter than 1 sale per month.

 

[Delux90]

cpa

 

[kickthat]

Interesting experiment. My vote would also be for Amazon. Like you say, one sale will easily get you there and with a reasonable amount of traffic to the site you should probably be expecting to see conversions.

Don't forget to make sure you have solid calls to action - which obviously weren't needed for the site when running adsense.

 

[Purush]

Amazon nothing to me .

 

[lrussell5]

It depends on the scenario, if like me you manage tourism type sites then selling a $1 book/map on amazon is not going to generate much of a commission. I may as well push my own ebook and get the full $1

 

[knowing25]

the winner is on the person who can make a lot of money from both.

 

[Deleted member 719276]

Altbaba wins everything.

 

[T2tkid]

If you have an informational site - Adsense
If you have a review type site, where you review products - Amazon
If you have informational + product review site - Amazon+Adsense.
Get to work.

 

[ttmschine]

Will update over next few days... Fingers crossed.

 

[Shree]

Since you have a site reviewing a product, I would expect Amazon to outperform AdSense.

 

[casperl]

In this case, Amazon should win.

 

[dichotom]

if you have a review type website then amazon will win because you will get lot of potential leads

 

[ttmschine]

Okay Dokey thought I'd update this because I've learned something interesting that might help other people as well with Adsense.

My Amazon experiment was rubbish - I only got 30 clicks in 14 days and earned zero, probably because Amazon had a limited range of the product from 1 supplier and it was expensive.

So I re-investigated Adsense to see if I could make the ads relevant to the content, and you can - to a degree. It isn't possible to stop Google from re-targeting (showing people ads based on their browser history) BUT you can tone it down a chunk.

*This might not be advisable for all websites, but if you're niche specific and have unrelated ads showing it could help you earn more.

In case it might help some of my fellow IMers, here's how to do it.

Step 1:

1) Log into Adsense.
2) Go to Allow & Block Ads
3) Go to Ad Serving
4) De-select "Personalised Ads" (this is where Google look at the visitors preferences from the Google and various other accounts, and shows them ads based on their interests instead of on the content of your web page)
5) I've also de-selected "Third party ads - use advertisers audience information..."

Step 2:

1) Go to sensitive categories
2) See which of those are not relevant to your website content
3) Turn them off

Step 3:

1) Go to general categories
2) Turn off any that are not relevant to your website content

Step 4:

If you aren't using link units - get some on your website, I've just stuck one right under my main menu, will be adding more later.

These link units DO display links that are ONLY relevant to your website content - no retargeting.

I've done this and am now seeing very relevant ads instead of ads for stuff I looked at on other websites or searched for a week or days ago.

I am pretty confident it will dramatically increase my adsense earnings, I hope it helps some of you too.

 

[CyberHour]

It always depend on the niche.. e.g CPC for VOIP is like 5-7$ , manage to get 10 clicks todaythat are 50-70$
CPC for Webhosting is from 0.50 to 3.50$ etc etc

 

[cnetworld]

Amazon Hands Down!!

#1 I have seen Google shutting down people's Adsense accounts without giving any reason or chance. They don't even reply you properly except you're the lucky one out of a million.

You're always at the risk - You'd never know when Google is going to come after you and ban your account, and won't pay you. It's just a ticking timebomb!!!

#2 The thing I like about Amazon is that you can actually calculate the approximate amount of money you can make. And Amazon sites are way easier to sell as compared to Adsense.

 

[Hawkster]

Depends entirely on what it is your doing and what your niche is. There is no one winner

 

[cantonman]

Okay Dokey thought I'd update this because I've learned something interesting that might help other people as well with Adsense.

My Amazon experiment was rubbish - I only got 30 clicks in 14 days and earned zero, probably because Amazon had a limited range of the product from 1 supplier and it was expensive.

So I re-investigated Adsense to see if I could make the ads relevant to the content, and you can - to a degree. It isn't possible to stop Google from re-targeting (showing people ads based on their browser history) BUT you can tone it down a chunk.

*This might not be advisable for all websites, but if you're niche specific and have unrelated ads showing it could help you earn more.

In case it might help some of my fellow IMers, here's how to do it.

Step 1:

1) Log into Adsense.
2) Go to Allow & Block Ads
3) Go to Ad Serving
4) De-select "Personalised Ads" (this is where Google look at the visitors preferences from the Google and various other accounts, and shows them ads based on their interests instead of on the content of your web page)
5) I've also de-selected "Third party ads - use advertisers audience information..."

Step 2:

1) Go to sensitive categories
2) See which of those are not relevant to your website content
3) Turn them off

Step 3:

1) Go to general categories
2) Turn off any that are not relevant to your website content

Step 4:

If you aren't using link units - get some on your website, I've just stuck one right under my main menu, will be adding more later.

These link units DO display links that are ONLY relevant to your website content - no retargeting.

I've done this and am now seeing very relevant ads instead of ads for stuff I looked at on other websites or searched for a week or days ago.

I am pretty confident it will dramatically increase my adsense earnings, I hope it helps some of you too.

Thanks for the information! I'm going to try this on my sites!

WSL

 

[LJ Junior]

Altbaba wins everything.

I heard that Altbaba is introducing a virtual baba to all its website audience. Is that true?