ShoppingAds – A New CPC Program by Text-Link-Ads
Posted by Jon Lee in Reviews, tags: adsense, advertise, amazon-associates, money, ShoppingAds, text-link-ads
I got an e-mail from Text Link Ads regarding a new CPC program that just went into beta testing called Shopping Ads.
A Different Pay Structure
This program is similar to Auction Ads and Amazon Associates in that it displays ads for products for sale online. The difference is how they pay you.
Both AuctionAds and Amazon Associates pay by action, meaning users must click on an ad on your site and actually buy something before you get any money. This can be very lucrative if you have an audience that knows what they are looking for or are impulsive buyers. I tried running Amazon Associates on this blog for a few weeks when I first started but quickly found the conversion rate abysmal. I would attribute this to my readers — they’re intelligent but not impulsive.
ShoppingAds on the other hand pays per click which means there is no need to worry about whether the clicks convert to sales. Both systems have their advantages and it really depends on which one is better suited for your site. I’d recommend trying both for a couple weeks to do a fair comparison.
As for exactly how much each click earns, the e-mail claims an average of $.20 per click which is substantially higher than what I’m getting from my Google Adsense ads. See a sample of the ad embedded below.
Ad Options
ShoppingAds is not content targeted (meaning it is compatible with Google Adsense) so you’ll need to define your own keywords. The system for defining keywords is easy and more powerful than other ad networks. You can use
- Semicolons to separate different keywords
- Commas to put keywords in order of importance
- Minus sign to exclude certain keywords
For example, ipod;iphone,mp3 player -case -screen -headphones will display iPods or iPhones units (not accessories) and if none are found, then other mp3 players will be displayed.
All the colors on the ad are customizable as well and there are 11 different ad sizes to choose from. Also, you can create your own campaigns (similar to Adsense channels) to keep track of individual ad performance.
Testing the Waters
I’ve placed a couple of their ads on this blog to see if they can actually live up to their claim of $.20 per click. I will report back in a few weeks to see how they’ve performed.
If you want to try it out yourself, you can sign up through my affiliate link and use the beta invitation code TLAPUB.
Understand that the program has just started in beta though so there are a few kinks and bugs (i.e. no way of deleting/editing campaigns you’ve created) but for the most part everything appears to work fine.
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