More Amazon Fluctuations

Hello good people!

When I left my apartment this morning to wander down to Starbucks for my morning Venti coffee and newspaper, my computer told me it was 61 degrees out.

When I left less than an hour later, my ipad told me it was in the 40’s and heading to the 30’s!! I have a feeling that I’ll be holed up in my apartment for the next few days!

Today I don’t have anything ground breaking to talk about; you can pretty much file this as a simple journal entry. But I do want to talk about some weird Amazon fluctuations that I’ve been seeing for the last couple of days.

If you’ve been reading this blog long, then you know that I primarily monetize my websites with Adsense, but towards the bottom of every web page I stick an Amazon.com widget that serves up a little picture and blurb about whatever that particular page is about, as well as a link that lets you order it from Amazon.com (earning me a 7% commission).

Back before the dreaded Panda Update, I was pulling in about $800 a month from Amazon commissions, but since then it’s dropped to less than half that.

But in the last few days…

A couple days ago I posted an article saying that Google’s up to something because my Adsense earnings have started to climb. Since then I’ve had a $75 adsense day, then a $58, then a $63…all a far cry from the $35-45 days I was seeing since the panda update (though still a far cry from the $150 days prior to panda).

About the same time that I started seeing Adsense earnings rise, I also started seeing Amazon earnings rise…but it doesn’t make much sense. Earnings are up, but traffic to amazon is staying about the same as it was post Panda.

What does this mean?

I don’t really know…it could just be luck. For instance, a couple days ago someone bought a fifteen hundred dollar bedroom set. That netted me a nice $100+ commission…but that’s just one item bought.

Then yesterday I had about ten different items ordered, but clearly seven or eight of them were purchased by the same one person (they were similar items so I assume they were bought by the same person). Again…one person buying a whole bunch of items doesn’t constitute a turnaround in earnings..just luck.

The other theory is that Google is sending me more quality traffic once again. I call these people “shoppers” as opposed to “readers”. Basically I think of people online as falling into those two categories. Either you’re here to buy something, or you’re here to read about something so that you can make an informed buy later on.

Shoppers are good for Adsense empires, readers are the death knell of Adsense empires. Consequently, you should always build your websites with shoppers in mind!

So what now?

Your guess is as good as mine! I’ll continue to monitor the stats and see if I can make any determinations. Hopefully both my Adsense and Amazon earnings will continue to rise. And in the mean time, I’m going to…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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