I agree. It's really ashame that they look so bad. You think google could make them look more polished.
It is very early to tell how people are experiencing it... remember, conversions are not always straight away. I haven't checked how long a click is valid (could be 30 days or so... and with that in mind, it could take 30 days after the click is made for a conversion to take place and payment to show up). In some cases it should be a lot earlier (for any actions that are sign-ups etc). Althoughn I have not checked out the payment details associated with referrals yet - nor seen specific details for individual referrals... some could be 15 days, 30days or 1 day etc).
I took a quick look at them yesterday and was really unimpressed. MOST of the campaigns ONLY have a 468x60 banner, that looks like a regular ad. No customization - nothing. Until more advertisers get in the game, and they allow customization of better ads.... I can say I won't be using them, i'll stick with my CJ.com
I implemented them on one of my sites, and waiting to see the results. I went for the category, so far I see it's been running for a day and displayed a couple dozen different ads. Am very curious to see how they perform in the long run. Dissapointed at the formats tho.
Well i am not sure about all this but my referral ads let me search key terms to find things. I picked keywords which complimented my site.. which in my cases has to do with phone cards, airfare, international calling... it seemed to bring up some relevant things my users would like. I placed the ad but so far it does not seem to be displaying ads that are relevant to the key words... could it take a few hours or days? Google says you can actively promote these products? Sorry, but that sounds like trouble to me and goes against everything I have ever known about the TOS?
It's because the referrals are CPA (per action) which is signup or purchasing something. You can promote them, but not the regular CPC ads. If you are familiar with CJ or ClickBank, the new referral products are like them.
Yesterday appeared Referrals 2.0 on our adsense account, it performed horrible, it seems our traffic it´s not good for it becuase of the type of conversion, we are a gaming and tech site from latinamerica.
It also depends where your visitors are coming from. It is annoying though - because you have to select the referrals available to a certain area... which immediately discounts a lot of traffic no matter where your traffic comes from. I would have though google would have geo-targetted based on where the user from coming from - what country etc and would show only referrals that were applicable to that persons country of origin. I haven't tried keywords yet - so not sure how long they take to show up - although to really benefit from the referrals it does look like selecting specific ads may work best - but then it depends on where your visitors are coming from whether you get commission even if they perform the action required. I also noticed some in the games that pay $0.01 for a signup - hmm, there has got to be some minimum on the CPA - unless the $0.01 is what is left AFTER google have taken their fee... but in that instance - giving traffic away for $0.01 isn't worth it - so category referrals don't look too promising as it seems it can easily be overflowing with MFARs (made for adsense referrals ). MFARs basically referrals taking advantage of category targeting that many will try and offering a pittance. Overall, it is still early days - and there are other things more important that spending too much time on referral ads at the minute. All I can say is that some people WILL make a lot from them while many will not see much increase in income.
Rotation works for me but I suspect the number of times a particular ad is shown depends on how much it pays and the conversion rate.
You are slightly wrong here. Referral programs do work where you can get leads and earn from it as people are making more than adsense using them, but with Google referrals that will not be the case. Google referrals are different than CJ and other affiliate networks. With other networks you can put links into your content and mask them so that they look like real links where you will not get credited for a sale or lead. With Google referrals it seems that you have to have "Referral Ads by Google" next to each one, which will decrease the CTR 2 - 5 times compared to CJ and other ads.
Great income,Did this all from the new google referrals programme . I only earn little (about $110 a middle website) from it
Google has a link way to go before they will catch up with CJ. To be honest I see very little value in the referrals 2.0 for publishers at the moment. If you have targetted traffic, CJ will allow you to earn more money