The Rollercoaster ride that is Auctionads

I’ve not said much about Auctionads in a few months, mainly because I did get to the point of almost actually removing it from all of my sites. I also had a post in draft entitled “Auctionads - Going, Going, Gone?” but this month things have taken a surprising….turnaround so I decided not to publish it.

I do a lot with the eBay Affiliate Program & I firmly believe that it’s one of the easiest Affiliate Programs out there to get started with. Think of almost anything out there to sell, any niche & you’ll more than likely find it on eBay. Instead of high competition on saturated offers in Affiliate Networks you can have free reign over certain niches.

Payment for earnings using CJ is a bit slower though, so until you build up a decent network of sites it may take a few months to get paid, however since Auctionads pays right at the end of the month for that months earnings, it gives newer publishers a headstart on those that are using CJ. I’m also a big fan of the Paypal payment, which is sent from a Paypal account (so you pay no fees) unlike such networks as Clixgalore (where you pay a 3% fee because they pay via Credit Card).

So here’s what happened after I introduced it onto a few sites, initially things were promising but then took quite a nosedive for two months due to click reporting & ad delivery problems:

1. Revenue was great in June (< $1,000)
2. Half of June’s numbers in July (> $1,000)
3. Half of that again in August (> $200)
4. September beat July’s number & things started improving again ( > $1,000)
5. October, well this month isn’t quite over yet but I thought I’d post a quick screenshot:

You can clearly see the click reporting problem on the above screenshot, but the revenue is now outperforming a few of my other programs such as Adsense & Amazon (eBay’s 30 Day Cookie verus the Amazon 24 Hour Cookie really helps here). All this revenue is from Organic Traffic no PPC whatsoever, so it’s all profit.

What kind of sites do I have it on: Most of the sites are in the Entertainment category & I serve ads for Digital stuff like the Wii & Digital Cameras etc. Using CJ I’ve had awesome success with niche sites that sell high demand products (products that people will Sign up to eBay just to buy, like trading cards & concert tickets).

There have been a few main issues with Auctionads over the past few months which I thought I’d also outline:

Downtime: As we’ve seen with other networks such as Blog Rush (which I refuse to even use), creators often aren’t prepared for the success that can happen overnight. This leadto serving problems with the ads & downtime = less earnings.

Irrelevant Ads Showing: For some strange reason this weird bug happened every Sunday without fail (perhaps eBay do soemthing strange on Sunday, who knows). This also meant that you’d be showing ads for Car Parts on a page that you’d originally targeted trading card ads on = less earnings.

Inaccurate Click Reporting: This is still an issue that hasn’t been resolved, whilst the earnings are back on track some days I’m still showing 20-30 clicks a day when in June I was seeing 200-300+ per day = frustration & innacurate CTR stopping you from optimising your ads to their full potential = less earnings.

Referral Reporting: I’m still unable to really determine how much of these earning are contributed to via Referrals, it could be a lot, it might not be. I’ve yet to have any replies regarding this issue.

eBay’s 30 day Cookie really seals the deal for me. Especially coming up to the Christmas period if someone clicks through on your ad then decides to buy all their Christmas presents on eBay then you still make the bank on the transactions. Let’s see something like Widgetbucks compete with that?