Referrals 2.0 Successes and Not so?

Hi, i thought i'd make this topic because i haven't found a large amount of discussions on the referrals 2.0 addition to adsense. I am just generally wondering what people are making of this and whether it has been successful for them.

I've been trying it for around a week with some success, and i've also used other cpa networks like CJ.

Anyway, so here's my story so far: ( i have tried to be vague with figures because i don't want to break ToS)

I started out by taking a popular site of mine, and integrating a web hosting text link from the referrals section. It didn't get many clicks and no conversions, which left me a bit dissatisfied, espceially as the site was gaining more traffic then ever before. Anyway, then i thought about it, and though web hosting is relevant to my sites content, webmasters already have hosting, and most aren't interested in changing, so it's not surprising my CTR was in nano-figures.

By changing the ad to another - similarly targetted towards webmasters, my click through rate has rocketed, and though signups do not come with every click (or even every 5 clicks) the offset of the earnings from a signup compared to a click mean that profits (at least for now) appear to be up. It will only take 2 signups a day to hit that $10 a day figure, and that's with one site.

Noticing this, i replaced the CPC ads on another site i own, that traditionally only earn about $0.05 a click, with CPA ads that give me $0.50. The figures here seem to indicate that more than one person signs up for every five clicks, so you can see here that CPA is a more profitable platform to be using.

An interesting thing about the CPA ads is that some are only text links. There is no ads by google signage until you hover over. This means the ads can be integrated amazingly well into articls and navigation menus.

It is also good to choose not to show best performing ads. Just because ads are best performing on the network, it doesn't mean they'll be best performing on your site, and you could end up with highly irrelevant ads that won't pay. Test yourself what best performs on your site and stick to those advertisers

Oh and the other thing i noticed is that you can change where you can get your CPA ads from. I am based in the united kingdom and there wasn't many ads targetted at the UK for my niches, however you can change it on the referrals page (i changed it to USA) and then there are alot more ads to choose from.


Hope this helps people and feel free to post your own stories.

http://www.swansoninternet.com/content/view/24/33/

 

nice share i am trying it right now so far no results but actually my sties are have very low traffic so not much there but good luck!

 

I think if you rely on a network of sites that have low traffic, then CPC might still be best for you because you can't afford to lose clicks that don't convert.

However, if you can afford to only have 1 click out of ten convert, then CPA (at least for me) seems to be a more profitable model. Or even better integrate both.

 

nice share. thanks!

 

From an Advertiser's stand point refferals are great. Their ads are plastered all over the web by us publishers and they only pay us when an action is completed... and pay nothing for us to display their ads.
Of course this is how it works but for me, Referrals are useless fodder and I only used them as page filler. ( Note: My pages are also useless fodder. So Referrals do fit in good. )

 

I'm extremely unhappy with Referrals - one of my main projects is an internet radio station centered around MMORPG's.

Because of our long-standing relationships with numerous game developers, we've always abstained from displaying anything related to gold-selling services etc. For anyone not familiar with the industry, basically gold-selling, power-levelling and all that jazz are against the Terms of Service of many MMORPGs. Most of the companies doing this have managed to avoid legal action by being careful in how they word their websites and product ads. Gold-selling and all related services are the bain of many games and honest gamers alike.

Anyhow... I digress... simply put; if we show gold selling ads on our site we would probably make a decent amount of money, however we could kiss goodbye to the relationships with game devs that grant us access to interviews, promos, contests etc.

So, this is the reason we've never shown adsense on our stations website; because the slightest sniff of MMORPG related keywords immediately throws our gold-selling advertisements.

When Referrals 2.0 hit, i was ecstatic to see a few MMORPG related ads that I could use which had nothing to do with unscrupulous services; and instead were actually ads for pretty high-profile games. So, I selected two of them, and put them in rotation on our site.

Three days later I was flooded by emails from listeners and site visitors complaining about us "supporting gold trading". I looked at the site and lo and behold, rather than the product ads i'd selected, there were ads for gold selling services.

God only knows how this happened, but needless to say I wasn't happy. Had a PR rep for one of the companies we work with stumbled by the site, as they often do, our relationship and reputation could have been ruined.

Now i'm not sure if I misread something or misunderstood how it all works - but surely when you pick the ad code for specific products etc that thats the ONLY thing that should show?

 

Thanks for sharing your experience, if more of us that started using it would share we will all have something to learn.

 

You selected show best performing ads when you selected the game ones.

 

oh great nice experience i m gona change the ads and try different placements.

 

I thought i would build on this by mentioning that you should select your advertisers very carefully for your niche. As mentioned above a webhost provider was relevant to my sites content, but my visitors already had hosting and didn't need it.

Unless you review products, or run a price comparsion site or something like that, it will be quite hard to generate a sale through a click - less leads = less $$$. What you need to select are advertisers who pay well per free signup. It's much easier to get someone to signup on a website for free then it is to get them to buy something. My particular advertiser pays $7 for a free signup and it's so targetted to my niche it's really easy to make more than in the CPC program.

Unfortunately, browsing advertisers with the referrals 20 program at the moment is a bit of pain, but if you can find that perfect program, and your site is not MFA, there's no reason why you can't succeed.

 

I removed the Referrals 2.0 because they just didn't work for me.
I suppose it depends on niche, etc.