Last month I did a lot of testing with AuctionAds. There was a lot of speculation on how the program would perform. I heard some people say it makes more than Google Adsense, while I’ve heard many others say it made them nothing. The program seems to perform best on shopping or product related sites, as the user would be more likely to make a purchase. How would AuctionAds compare to other network I run on my sites?
I don’t have any shopping or sales related sites, but I went ahead with testing anyway. At first I was seeing some very low numbers and wasn’t too thrilled about the program, but still wanted to test it enough so I would earn my first check with them. My target was to make at least .01 per click with the program. From my initial testing with only one 468×60 banner on one of my sites, I was pulling only .0037 per click. Unhappy with the results I decided to throw a couple more 468×60 banners and some new skyscrapers. I targeted the banners to show items ranging from funny tshirts, celebrities, games, ipods and more. I was able to push a lot more volume and the earnings per click jumped up a decent amount.

Play Around with Your Ad Targeting to Increase Clicks & Earnings
While the earnings above are hopefully still updating, they still give a pretty accurate average on how the month ended out. Total earnings for the month ended at $216.27, from over 3 Million impressions and 23,565 clicks… rounding out to just under a penny per click, at 0.0091. I would like to see a few more updates to last months stats (as they are delayed), and to push the earnings per click to at least a penny.

Auction Ads Earnings for May 2007
Even though the numbers from last month were low, I will still push the program this month because of the new higher payouts coming into effect this month. Also, I only started running Auction Ads on the 9th of last month. With the new higher payouts in effect and a full month’s worth of running the campaigns, I would really like to see end of the month earnings around $750 and a little more than a penny earned per click. If I continue to see a penny or less per click, I will have to play with the targeting more, or replace the campaign with better performers.
Good info. I just calculated my earnings per click at around .oo85 but ahve done absolutely no testing whatsoever. I'm only testing on one site, so my # of clicks is much much lower than yours as well. I think I'll start playing with my keywords a bit and see if I can convert more clicks to sales. Have you tried the semi-colon feature at all to roate keywords? It's be nice to see keyword tracking in the report interface so I could better see which keywords convert.
Haven't tried the rotation setup yet.
so far i only made $0.004179 per click. Need to think of a way to increase that.
Zac.. i think i'm going to wait a bit and see if you do hit that $750..as you hope to in another month or two..and if you do..i'm going to sign up for Auction Ads (i know what i'm saying has absolutely no correlation to what you earn from Auction Ads but since i recently signed up my blog for its first ad network i wanna wait a bit before i sign up for another.
Im not as impressed with this.. so far we've earn 2.55$
not anything to write home about, but I think it just doesnt fit our niche
Which keywords did you find were the most effective? I've tried video games, ipod, cell phones, hockey, nintendo… pretty much working on products that I actually talk about on my blog. I didn't know about the rotating keyword feature, maybe I should try that.
I removed AuctionAds from my blog as it was not giving back anything. Not even the $5 promised to me for joining. I feel it might be ok for high traffic sites.
Did you remove any other affiliate programs so you could implement AA into your sites? Or did you just add that onto your affiliates that you were using and the $216 is extra bonus added on to the money and affiliate programs that you already use?
I was able to add some banners in place of a few text links that were on some sites, other placements for skyscrapers were just free space I had. The volume/revenue from the text links were low enough to consider them minimal. Replacing/testing their placement with AuctionAds ended up making more money and proved to be a nice case study.
Howdy Zac –
Thanks for the interesting post. I learned a lot from this simple but powerful disclosure of visitors, clicks and conversion… Thanks for sharing a bit of the secret sauce.
-Mark
wow over 3 Million impressions , How Can i Increse my Impressions ? any suggestions Thanks
You can increase impressions by getting more traffic and puting more ads.
I've found that Auction Ads has worked really well on a couple of sites, but on most it isn't the ideal money maker.
I am a fan of Auction Ads. I have reached the payout level for the last two months. As for per click revenue for May 85 clicks for $0.1425 and April was 57 clicks for $.2561 per click.
It works great for me as I have a tightly defined niche. Also I can put ads at the end of posts that are directly related to the subject being written about. If you are reading about an item and then you see an ad about the same thing it really helps the conversion.
I can say so far auction ads is a great setup, as it targets some of my sites DEAD on! so CTR is good and buy ratio is good also.