A bit of a setback - but that's good news!
Well, since I wasn't posting all that much while things were going good, nobody heard how excited I was about my AdSense results. For a while I was making a pretty decent profit by using AdWords to send traffic to a couple of my sites, and the pages that I was sending the traffic to (my landing pages) had Google AdSense on them.
Most good internet affiliate marketers do one of two things:
1. They use Google AdWords to drive traffic straight to their merchants, or...
2. They set up pages with lots of good content which give their visitors a reason to come back over and over, and a review of merchants that the web site publisher is an affiliate for. Occasionally a visitor will visit a recommended external site based on the recommendation.
As long as the affiliate is only recommending merchants that he or she feels has a quality product, it creates a win/win situation for everyone. The visitor finds good information about a product they can use, the merchant makes a sale from a consumer that might not have found them otherwise (or at least wanted an unbiased review of the product before plunking down the cash), and the affiliate that created the web page gets a commission for the work and money expended in getting the traffic to come through their site to the merchants.
At least that's the way a typical affiliate relationship is supposed to work. I guess I got sidetracked when I saw that profits could be made without making an affiliate commission. And when one did occur, that was icing on the cake.
But, about a week ago, things took a sudden turn. Without giving out hard numbers (which Google prohibits its web publishers from doing), the average revenue per click came way down, to the point where for the same volume of clicks, what once was profitable became a losing situation. Not good.
So it's back to the drawing board, and actually in thinking about it, that's a good thing, because what really happened was I was distracted by a type of phenomenon that shouldn't have been my real goal anyway. My goal should be in creating terrific web pages and sites that provide value to the visitor and a conduit to merchants that give good products my visitors are interested in.
I still wonder why the average AdSense rate went down for me, if anybody out there that's an AdSense publisher has noticed the same thing, let me know, it could only be one of three things:
1. People were suddenly clicking on lower status ads (for example instead of clicking on the top ad which pays more, they were clicking on the 4th ad listed).
2. Advertisers suddenly reduced their bid prices in the middle of September.
3. Google changed downward the percentage of revenue that they give to their publishers. Now that the IPO has happened, and they have stockholders to answer to, I wonder.........
Which it is remains a mystery, maybe someday we'll know. But for now, I'm back to designing web pages that aren't reliant on Google AdSense revenue.
