Ebay has its fair share of affiliates but Adsense is definitely more popular. I read the various features Ebay's affiliate program offers and on the surface, Ebay's affiliate program should be more successful than any Adsense campaign theoretically. Why? 1. You can create "Adsense-like" ads with Ebay. You can create text links pointing to any section/auction in Ebay. You can mimic the exact style of Adsense ads but without the "Ads by Google". Just have a text link and a brief paragraph underneath it. Even better, you can write whatever you want in the text link ad. I mean, think about how great Adsense would be if you got to control what the ads said?.. Well, Ebay let's you do this, no? 2. You can put Ebay text links in your navigation. I believe I read somewhere in Ebay's official affiliate page this is even encouraged. You can put a link to an Ebay page directly in your navigation menu.. think about the CTR of that link. If you have a game site, you can have a link called "Buy Games" right next to your "Home" link in your navigation. Adsense doesn't enable you to do such clever disguising. Putting Adsense ads in your navigation menu? I wish. I'm not talking about the Ebay Toolkit, or the various banner ads Ebay gives you. Those, in my opinion are ineffective or are mediocre options. The Flexible Destination TEXT LINK seems just awesome. I mean, you can just innocently place a text link pointing to an auction in your website news or an article, and BOOM - 50% of your readers might click on it. I know, I know, you don't get paid unless that person bids on the item. But I mean, a bunch of internet users are Ebay users. You get credit for any winning bid for any product within 7 days if they click on any Ebay link on your site. CJ says you get around .05 per click. this is probably the lowest Google Adsense payout per click. But if a lot more ppl click on your Ebay links, the payoff should be much more. So what am I missing? Why isn't Ebay's affiliate program more popular than Google Adsense?
and on an even more simple level..people are lazy. If I use ebay I'd have to actually work on the ads and getting them to match the content of my site, correct? With adsense I just put up some code and Google does all the work..
I do use both, and AdSense makes way more earnings!!!! Case in point....last month I made about a measly $30.00 from ebay. (I got a measly 2,145 pageviews on my ebay sites over the last month.)
On a pound for pound basis I reckon that eBay is far outperforming the adsense revenues on my site. In my case though, it is because my site is an eBay misspelt listings site which is integrated with eBay via the XML API so in my case, all the eBay related content displayed is there because the user requested. This means that the users are probably going to click through on the eBay links because they want to see what is on the other end of the link. The adsense links on the other hand are secondary. Hope that makes sense! Phil
Yeah, that makes sense. I am planning to create a site with the eBay API as well, where users would want to click on my affiliate links, since it's part of the functionality/theme of the site. I think this would be profitable, as potentially 50% of my visitors will end up having 7-day cookies credited to me.
If you need any help getting started with the eBay API just let me know, I found that getting started was pretty straightforward but once you wanted your application to start using proper live eBay data, there were quite a few hoops to jump through! Phil
Philnet, I'd love help getting started with the ebay API. Have you written a tutorial on it? Or a blog? Someone must have! Has anyone come up with some really creative ideas to do with the API? It must be possible to do some clever stuff.
Ebay affiliate program is a win-win situation. You bring sales for Ebay and they pay you. My experience is that it takes much less traffic to make $100/day with Ebay than Adsense.