Goodbye to AuctionAds
It’s been fun, but now we must say goodbye to the once awesome AuctionAds. In the beginning you were innovative, profitable and showed some promise… but now with a mere few months under your belt and your original founders passing you along, you have simply become the nasty clutter which builds up in your back room and takes up space. Why so extreme harsh? It’s just unfortunate that a program which earns $1,728.13 can fall to an astounding $61.48! Let’s take a look at the fast rise and even faster decline of AuctionAd’s performance on my sites.
May was the first month I decided to run AuctionAds and it was already halfway through the month at that point. I gave the program another shot in June, despite it’s "ok" performance in May. June turned out to be great, but from there it all went down hill. In July I had nearly the same impressions served as June, but only half the clicks (reported). Then in August I had around a 20% drop in impressions, but clicks continues to be way off again… off nearly 20,000 clicks from the previous month. September was the last straw andless than 1,000 clicks were reported, from over 6 million impressions.
I know that AuctionAds has said they were having issues with their click tracking, but it’s been weeks since anything was fixed, and numbers just kept declining. If this horrible decline in stats would have occurred if Jeremy and others were still in charge, I don’t know. However, I think it was an amazing job on his part to get out at the peak when he did.
Over the past five months of running AuctionAds I made a decent $3200+, which is a ton more than I have heard from other members which never met their minimum payment levels with the program. I rarely see the program running on any sites anymore and I completely understand why. It’s a shame the program had to fail. I enjoyed posting my earnings and feeling on the program each month, but now it is time, and I must say goodbye. AuctionAds will now be removed from my network of sites.
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"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
How many sites did you have AuctionAds on? That is some great earnings you had going there. That big of a dropoff is strange.
Only a few, but the declining numbers were across the board. I’ve replaced them all with WidgetBucks now and will see how that performs.
I completely agree, I think AuctionAds was a fantastic program when it first came out. Then all the tracking issues came along, then the revenue was falling fast. I knew I had to stop using them about a month ago. I kept giving them the benefit of the doubt, but in the end I just couldn’t’ hang on anymore.
Wow that is a massive drop in revenue! I haven’t used it myself so I don’t know much about it. Do you think this revenue drop is tied in with the sale of AuctionAds or do you think it could just be ‘banner blindness’ kicking in?
Auction Ads is a joke. The drop I have experienced is similar to yours and is as huge as 1000% plus in drop.
I’ve ditched the ads too, but surprisingly I still see a lot of sites using them. Sometimes there are 10 ad units stacked on top of each other, so you can’t miss em! (Not sure on those sites’ CTR or earnings though…)
[…] Goodbye to AuctionAds […]
We are also dropping AuctionAds. We went from earning a few hundred dollars in May w/ 1.17% CTR down to earning $11 in Sept with 0.11% CTR. Severely disappointing.
I am also thinking of not runnning AuctionAds any more
I really never got started. I put Auction Ads on for a while, but never like the look of the ads, so I took them off.
I plan on adding this to my site. I think it will work great, especially since they pay per click. Auction Ads was sucking for me since day one.
Hey i feel the same man. I had it on one of my news websites. It did well for 2months and that was all. too bad.
That’s a pity, I expect the spike was due to user interest in the beginning until they got the wiser and realised they were ads and became immune to them as well!
Hey -
Maybe a dumb questions here, but what are you using to generate that graph from the monthly impression, clicks, revenue table??
Looks like a screen shot of excel on a mac ..
BUT, would you be willing to share your spreadsheets you use for tracking your aff marketing efforts?
Don’t need data, just the tracking tools … I am still looking for spreadsheets that will work for me for this.
Thank in advance if you can share.
Wow that’s bad!
Such a sudden decrease!
Good one saying good bye.
I may be wrong, but it looks like AWStats to me.
Your graph looks almost exactly like mine.. Great in May, ok in June, horrible in July/August..
It was a great start, but it fell apart pretty quickly..
[…] I’m not that surprised, nor upset. These are initial stats and this just means I need to do more testing. Setting the category of ads shown to "Movies" will likely pull in the most clicks, but are probably low earning clicks. I will not start tracking and monetizing the program by running a few other categories and see how they perform. I will keep running the program at least until I hit my minimum payment requirements. AuctionAds wasn’t that great the first month I ran them, but the next month after, I was able to rack up $1700+ in commissions. […]
[…] Goodbye Auction Ads I first ran across ZacJohnson.com several months ago and have had the site in my feedreader ever since. It first caught my eye when I was running AuctionAds on one of my sites with minimal success. It was nice to see I wasn’t the only one dissatisfied with AuctionAds. […]
[…] just read a post over at Zac Johnson’s blog where he tells of his falling revenue over the summer months with Auction Ads. He earned $1,728 in […]
I had almost the exact same trend of a great start and then plummeting results ( I actually had a couple of $40 plus clicks in June of 2007 and this month I’ll be lucky to make $40 total for the entire month … so much potential and then it tanks … too bad, I guess I’ll try WidgetBucks.