Shopzilla As Adsense Replacement?
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Well it’s Monday and we’re off and running for another week of making money online. Spent the weekend wandering around Costco with my girlfriend. Yes, it takes a weekend to wander through that entire store! Whew.
Today I want to talk about the Shopzilla publisher program as an alternative monetization method to Adsense.
There’s lots of reasons why you should have a backup to Adsense as a way to monetize your websites. One of the most important reasons is that Adsense has a history of kicking people out of the program for no good reason and making it really difficult to get back in.
It’s basically a sort of mix between adsense and a traditional shopping affiliate like Amazon. They offer the ability to show ads that look like Adsense text ads, as well as product ads that look like Amazon widgets. It’s really the best of both worlds…in theory.
I’m not sure they pay out as nicely as Adsense, though I suppose it depends on the specific niche you’re targeting. Some pay out better than others.
And certainly they don’t have as broad a range of advertisers as Adsense, nobody does.
But if their ad line is similar to your niches, then they may be a viable alternative for you. They offer lots of different widgets, dynamic ads, price comparison ads, etc. which are really better than Adsense in a lot of ways.
Last week I redesigned some of my site templates to facilitate Shopzilla ads instead of Adsense ads…both text ads and widget type ads (and also price comparison ads which Shopzilla does very well).
Sure, this test has only ran for a few days, but I think you’ll be very interested in the results. Here’s how the numbers break down:
| Date | Impressions | Redirects | Estimated Earnings |
| Jul 15, 2012 | 1,383 | 1 | $0.07 |
| Jul 14, 2012 | 986 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Jul 13, 2012 | 727 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Jul 12, 2012 | 613 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Jul 11, 2012 | 403 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Jul 10, 2012 | 412 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Jul 09, 2012 | 526 | 0 | $0.00 |
| Jul 08, 2012 | 204 | 0 | $0.00 |
| TOTAL: | 5,254 | 1 | $0.07 |
It doesn’t really take a rocket scientist to analyze these numbers. Over five thousand impressions and only a single click on any ad whatsoever, for a whopping $.07 cents!
These numbers seem pretty damning, but they really aren’t. Why? Because I put these ads on brand new websites and I suspect nearly all of those impressions are all the Googlebot crawling the sites. I seriously doubt that any human beings saw any of those ads, except maybe yesterday when someone finally clicked one.
So I’m not ready to say one way or another whether Shopzilla is a good ad network or not. I suspect once those sites get fully indexed and real traffic starts pouring through the sites, we’ll see some decent click thru rates.
I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as I have definitive data to share. Yeah, I know I did a sneaky sort of thing there by showing you data that isn’t really relevant…but it’s Monday 😛
Have you used Shopzilla on any of your websites? If so, what kind of results did you see? Comment below…
Keep on building!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
