Shopping Ads: A Waste of Time and Space
For the past month, I have been displaying ShoppingAds on my website. They were on Beta testing so I could understand if the system had bugs in it. It promised to be much like AuctionAds. In fact, it looked like auction ads, except that the come on was that this was to be a CPC program (cost per click), much like Adsense with images of the items for sale with prices, too! The invitation to join the program came from Text Link Ads and I was given an invitation code.
The big come-on to me was that the earnings were going to be CPC-based. So I made it a point to create new campaigns that I felt would match the pages of my travel website. After redesigning each page to make space for their aid units, suddenly the ads stopped appearing, leaving ugly blank spaces that had no rhyme or reason.
Then magically the ads reappeared. Either advertisers were not happy with the revenues or I read somewhere that someone hacked into their system and they had to set things in order before resuming. When it returned I noticed that there was this tiny notice that said ‘CPC = US traffic, CPA = non US traffic.’
Until a few days ago, I saw that the default campaign was for CPC while all other specific campaigns were to be CPA (which they define as cost per acquisition), which mean you only get paid when the ad is clicked and an action is performed by the clicker (such as a purchase or sign-up). So I changed all my campaigns to default, because I preferred CPC. This meant another round of editing pages.
There’s a 2-day delay in reporting so I kept thinking that maybe the revenue from clicks I was getting would not be seen immediately. Certainly there were many impressions because I started placing ads on my most popular pages first.
Well, today I suddenly saw that the invitation code was no longer required to log-in and ‘Note: All Non-US traffic will always see CPA ads, regardless of configuration.” 85% of my traffic for the travel website comes from the Philippines, while the U.S.A. and the rest of the world share the 15%. Since only clicks from the U.S.A will be paid based on CPC, so my chances of getting a paid click was diminished considerably.
So now I will manually remove Shopping Ads from my website, which is such a bother.
I am sorry I wasted my time by given them space in my website. Despite generating many impressions for them for ad units strategically located to generate clicks, my earnings for the past month have been — ZERO.
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One Response to “Shopping Ads: A Waste of Time and Space”
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Hello,
I would like to try shoppingads on a few sites, but they are not accepting any new sign ups currently. So my question is, can i have your account? I don’t mind paying you a small fee for it.
Please let me know, you can contact me at chunghang89@gmail.com
Thanks and Best Regards,
Chung Hang