Choosing Your Referral Ads

9.3 Choosing Your Referral Ads

Fig. 9.3 So many choices, so many ways to make money...

Obviously where you put your ads will be important. But choosing what you advertise will be even more important.

One option is to go for the highest paying ads, put them on your site and hope.

You’ll probably be hoping a lot and earning little.

Unless your referral ads are closely linked to the content on your page, you’re not likely to get many clicks, let alone many conversions.

It might be tempting to put J.G. Wentworth’s $76.92 ad on your site, for example, but unless you have the sort of users who are likely to want structured settlements, you’ll just be wasting valuable space on your page.

It might also be tempting to choose keywords or categories and let Google do the thinking for you. It does a pretty good job with the ads in AdSense units, so why shouldn’t it do a good job with the ads in Referral units too? Google even gives you a checkbox marked “Pick Best Performing Ads” that overrules your choice and places what it thinks is the best ad for your site.

(Actually, that box does something else too: it automatically serves up a different ad if your chosen advertiser ends his campaign. Leave the box unchecked and you’ll be left with a empty space. The best solution is to pick a big company with a big budget and keep a close eye on your referral ads.)

There are a couple of reasons why you should be choosing Referral ads yourself, by product, and not leaving it to Google.

The first is that the referral inventory is smaller than the AdSense inventory. That means there’s a much better chance that Google will get it wrong and give you something that’s close but not close enough.

It also means that there aren’t so many ads available that you can’t browse them yourself and make your own decision.

The choice you make should be a compromise between the price you can earn for the action and the closeness of the ad to your own content.

That’s going to be a calculated risk at first, followed by experimentation to make sure you’ve made the right decision.

The other reason you should be picking your own individual ads yourself is that you can recommend the products in your referral units. That’s an important difference in comparison to AdSense units and it’s a crucial element in optimizing your ads to get maximum conversions.