Making Money with Affiliate Sales

The adsense CTR of one of my niches has been falling. This, along with pissing me off, has given me the challenge of increasing the payback of the site.

Traditionally, I haven’t had a huge success with affiliate marketing in this niche – the visitors tend to be in and out fast, with perhaps a click on an ad. Nonetheless, I have everything set up to do Aff Marketing, so my first thought is to swap out some of the adsense with affiliate offers. With the adsense payoff falling, it is at least worth trying.

So I dropped in some offers, and watched while the adsense ctr fell yet even a little further.

But wait, I thought to myself, what if seeing the graphic affiliate offers against the text is putting people off clicking the adsense even further?

There was only one thing for it – a split test to check the aff offers weren’t interfering with the adsense.

The easiest way to segment the audience was by grabbing their IPs, looking at the last digit and splitting by oddness. Here’s the PHP code I used:

$flagOdd = false;
$txIP = substr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], strlen($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) - 1);
if (1 == ((int) $txIP) % 2) {
$flagOdd = true;
}


Then, if the flag was odd, I showed them a split between adsense and aff offers, and if it was even I only showed them adsense.

The results

Unbelievably, the adsense ctr and ecpm was *higher* if aff ads were shown sometimes.
WTF? I hear you chime in with me.

I have 2 possible explanations:

1. The visitors were ‘tired’ of the adsense and were more likely to click if they had other options.

However, the site has 80% new visitors, so this doesn’t seem likely.

2. The ctr was dropping because traffic growth was making me reach the limits of growth of what this site can get from adsense – I am running out of advertisers.

I’m not sure how much I like this reasoning, as the ctr is low all day – its not as if it drops at the end of the day. We do not know how adsense segments the day – by the hour perhaps? – and their reports don’t allow you to accurately track how the clicks change through the hour, so its possible, and its what I am going with now.

So – split testing has shown me that this site has reached the limit of Adsense’s advertisers. For further traffic growth I need to find additional funding sources.

What can you think of that you should be split testing?

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via
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