Volume 2 Number 1
January 2010
In the past two sections of this tutorial, we have covered two items which allow you to increase your revenue that your website brings in. There are others out there and this week we cover one that our actual milage with has been less than desirable with.
Commission Junction is an affiliate management house which brings together hundreds of advertisers who want to set up affiliate programs with the web masters and Commission Junction manages the whole lot. While this has its advantages, it also has some severe down sides as you will see later in this tutorial. However, for those who do not have the time to manage their own affiliate programs, they will find the Commission Junction brings together a great assortment of advertisers.
The good thing about a place like commission junction is that they can bring together advertisers from almost every realm. Thus if you are a web master with a pet grooming site, you will likely found advertisers whose programs are specifically tuned towards that type of site and that are selling pet foods or grooming supplies. This can go a long way in bringing the site and the advertising into line so that the site seems to be seamless and not overrun with ads.
Commission Junction also shows you the percentages, the sales terms, and the amount per sale that you will receive when you sign up to run a certain advertiser's promotions. And like Adsense, they provide the code for the ad based on the size of ad you choose. While they do have a good number of sizes, compared to Adsense, the number of ad sizes is somewhat limited.
The biggest disadvantage to Commission Junction is the fact that people tend to select too many advertisers for their website. Thus their website becomes one big billboard for everyone else's products instead of your website with information for the end user. While it may seem prudent to include a number of ads in order to hedge your bets, I have found that this does not exactly translate into money. Your ads need to be selective and inline with what your website is about.
PlentyofFish.com is one site that proves that this inline concept works. Their site is a dating site that only carries ads for dating sites. They make money handily and they are not doing anything special other than being selective in the ads they place and while one may think that you would not want to advertise other sites when yours is the one you want people to come to, you also need to remember, that those other sites are the ones that are paying the ads. And while your site will be a passthrough point for those other sites, keep in mind at the average eyeball time on a particular site is very low unless their is something specifically that users want.
Commission Junction is a good collection of advertisers but a lot of the responsibility for selecting a good advertising plan lies completely with the web master and Commission Junction will not help you with this process other than to provide possibilities and to provide statistics on the performance of the ads. This means that you must take more time to select ads that fit.
This is where Adsense and other advertisers are better for a website than Commission Junction. The other websites use keyword tracking to place the appropriate ads and Comission Junction uses you to place the ads.
While this type of advertising management company is alright for some users, most individual users will find that they should stick with Adsense or other advertisers that are more attuned towards the individual user.
Next month, we will take a look at some of the other advertisers in the ad placement real including BuySellAds.com and other similar sites.