Auction Ads: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Now that I’ve been using AuctionAds for about a week, I feel like I’m familiar enough to write a quick review.
The Good
Higher Payouts
If you’re currently using ebay’s affiliate program through Commission Junction, you’d be crazy not to give AuctionAds a try. AuctionAds automatically puts you in the highest payout tier because your conversions are counted along with all the other publishers.
No Rake
I’m not 100% sure about this, but I’ve heard rumors that for the first six months of operation, publishers get 100% of the revenue. This means if you’re on the fence about trying AuctionAds you should try it now before they start taking their share!
CPA
It’s nice to have an ad network that supports all the standard ad sizes, but pays CPA instead of CPC. If you have targeted traffic that is in the “buying state of mind” you’ll do much better with AuctionAds than with its competitors.
Easy To Use
If you can use Adsense, YPN, or Chitika you can use AuctionAds. Configuring and installing the code is very similar.
The Bad
Small Cache
One of the sites I’m using AuctionAds on is for a very specific niche that isn’t very popular online. It’s a new site and it’s getting about 100 uniques per day. The problem I’m seeing is that if the site is dormant for a little while, the next person sees the RON ads (ipods, etc.). I’d like to see AuctionAds increase its cache so that it doesn’t have to resort to the RON ads as often.
Lack of Information
I said before that I wasn’t sure if AuctionAds was giving 100% of its revenue to its publishers for the first six months. The truth is that their website is not very clear about how much money they withhold or even how publishers make money. The website states that publishers are paid whenever a user “completes an action” on ebay. It’s probably safe to assume that means we get paid whenever a user wins an auction or creates a new account (the same terms as the affiliate program through CJ), but it would be nice if this was a little more clear.
No Conversions!
I’ve been using AuctionAds for about a week and have yet to have a single conversion. To be honest, I’m not really all that surprised. AuctionAds isn’t for every site, and the sites I tried them on have never had much luck with CPA ads.
Unreliable?
As I write this review, the AuctionAds website is down. This means that no ads are showing on my sites and (even worse) my sites are taking forever to load because they are waiting for the AuctionAds code to timeout. This is the first time I’ve seen this happen, so hopefully it won’t be a sign of things to come.
The Ugly
Giving Info To Your Competitors
Shoemoney is one of the founders of AuctionAds. Whether you realize it or not, Shoe is one of your most formidable competitors. If you have a site that is raking in the dough in a small niche with AuctionAds, don’t be surprised if Shoemoney throws up a site in that niche to experiment. He’s a smart businessman, and you can be sure he’s watching the conversion data from AuctionAds.
It may seem like I wouldn’t recommend AuctionAds after this review, but that’s not the case. I think, like anything, you should experiment and see if it works for you. I’m going back to the CPC model for most of my sites, but I’ll keep AuctionAds in the back of my mind for future projects.
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I had to scramble to get the Auction Ads code off of 3 sites. Pages where taking forever to load. There are going to be 5,000+ unhappy bloggers. This is not a good start!
[…] looks like the ugly part of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly has come to […]
No Conversions!
Any thoughts on conversion rates? Seems to me they are pretty bad! There seem to be too many steps required, from the item displayed being of sufficient interest, to the user actually clicking, then bidding, then buying, blah blah blah. My CTR is something appalling like 1.2%, and then you can imagine what the conversion rate is… I will probably be removing them soon…