AuctionAds a Waste of Time

I recently decided to give AuctionAds.com a try and, so far, have found it to be a huge waste of my time. Here’s the deal: AuctionAds is a new ad service which allows you to run banners which contain live Ebay auctions. Essentially, its a banner network like Adsense, but the content of the ads are Ebay auctions. Where your revenue is supposed to come from is affiliate commissions from Ebay based on user actions. In order to run AuctionAds, you do not have to sign up to be an eBay affiliate. You simply sign up for AuctionAds and they take care of the rest.

AuctionAds sounded good when I heard about it. It is the brainchild of Jeremy Shoemaker, whose blog over at ShoeMoney is pretty well known. The guy is undoubtedly a fantastic internet marketer. He knows his stuff. I heard him on an interview with John Reese and they talked about AuctionAds at length. After listening to that interview, I decided to check it out. Signing up for the account was dead easy. Once the account was created, I was at first a little confused on how to set up the ads. I found that I had to enter my own keywords. I had to play around with those keywords in order to get any decent stuff showing up in my banners. I was picking computer related stuff because I was going to try out the ads over on the PC Mechanic Forums.

A Whopping $3.00

I ran the ads on a trial basis on my forums (one banner spot is still up there as I write this). As of now, I have served 57,607 impressions in these trial spots and have made only $3.00. The click-through ratio (CTR) is on par with what I usually achieve with Adsense, however the revenue is much lower. So, basically, I’m making about 5 cents CPM right now with AuctionAds.

Needless to say, that sucks.

Disclaimer is Warranted

Yes, I’m complaining. However, let’s be fair. There ARE people (I hear) who are making decent coin from AuctionAds. Perhaps what it comes down to is that it depends heavily on what kinds of sites you try it on. Perhaps a niche site where the people are generally already there to BUY something would work better. Running ads like this on forums is perhaps not the best test. That said, my forums are pretty highly trafficked and, yes, I DO have people who are in there looking for information on parts they are thinking of buying for their computers. So, its not a total mismatch.

What was also disappointing was the lack of information on the AuctionAds website on how to optimize your ads. Sure, they have the blog, but the site itself is overly simplistic. They don’t even provide any decent detail on how the revenue is generated. Is it by sale? By new signup? What the hell? The “How It Works” page is a total joke, basically regurgitating the obvious. It is a new service, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But, to mature, I really think they need to make this system more automatic. Make the ad code so that it can automatically use keywords for contextually relevant ads. Supply more detailed information on how to USE the ads to actually generate some revenue. As of now, they assume the user knows too much.

I purposely tried AuctionAds from the perspective that most would use Adsense. I made a few ads and copy/pasted the code. I did not spend endless hours trying to optimize things or dynamically insert keywords or anything like that. But, most users will do the same.

The Future

I am not going to toss in the towel quite yet with AuctionAds. I just think they need some maturing before it will be a contender to Adsense for the majority of publishers. For now, the revenue sucks. At least for me. I’m going to revert to others and remove AuctionAds – for now. But, I will continue to watch what’s going on and perhaps jump back in and give it a try again later.

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 12,000 people who receive exclusive online business and blogging tips, and get a FREE COPY of my eBook, Six Figure Blogger Blueprint (PDF and MP3)! Just enter your name and email below: