I'm done with Adsense...for NOW

7
1.4K followers

NO MORE AD-SENSE, NO MORE AD-SENSE!!!


So after making a few hundred $$ I decided to give Google ad sense a break....... for now.

Why you ask? I realized that in the long run, not having ad-sense will actually be better for me.

I currently have 3 sites that I am putting most of my efforts on right now. I am leaving Ad-sense on one of the sites until I can find some good affiliate products for that niche.

So Why Leave Ad-sense?


Most people have abandoned Ad-sense because they feel that it turns away the more "motivated" visitors. I must say (at this point) I have to agree with that.

If someone is interested enough to stick around on my site, and further motivated enough to click on some links...I would want that link to be an affiliate link that could earn me one time (or recurring) commissions of $20 or more, as opposed to $1.75 and I never see or hear from that visitor again.

The other NEWBIES are making $$$$, What About me???


I recently noticed more than a few blogs by some newbies saying they got their first sale by reading the "earn your First $50" training module from Kyle.

I decided to check this module out....even though I have been with WA since Nov 2011 and encourage everyone to check out the WAbinars and training modules. I know I know, shame on me for not practicing what I preach.

After going through the training and following up on the notes I realized that I already had several referrals (6) that had done the initial signup and 4 that had actually went as far as creating profile information. 3 of those 4 referrals have over 65 followers here in WA!

I actually Do Well With Referrals and Signups


On one of my websites I also have a referral link to the online survey website cashcrate. To date I have 51 signups and 21 active members.

I never gave all this much thought until I went through the earn your First $50 training. But I realize that 57 (cashcrate and WA combined) people found my content valuable enough to signup. It is truly a good feeling to know that I helped others.

I can't help thinking about how many potential subscribers may have ended up on another site through an ad-sense ad.

If I had just 21 referrals on WA that would be a recurring income of $472 per month. With just 4 active members that would be $90 per month. Honestly, it would take a lot of ad-sense clicks to match those amounts.


You Need MASSIVE Amounts of Traffic to make Good Ad-Sense Money

I pulled up a screenshot (see below) of someone's ad-sense earnings reports. To realistically make $40,000 this person had to get almost 250 million impressions and 171,675 clicks.


To make even 10% of that ($3,900) you would still need over 8million impressions in a month.....no wonder people give up.

Google does not allow you to publish your impressions and clicks and now I can see why. You need A LOT of traffic to make serious $$$, and google closes down accounts all the time.

With the google slaps galore I am a long way from getting THAT kind of traffic.


So for now....I'm going to focus on referrals, writing good content, and getting more people to willingly signup for my products as opposed to "hoping" they click on my ads.

Curious to know what everyone's thoughts are on using Ad-sense?

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Recent Comments

19

Could not agree more. Used it for a very short time. Good luck to you!

Thanks Shawn! Seems like most of us eventually get to that point. I have been noticing that most websites don't even have adsense ads anymore although these are the most lucrative of all the ad services.

eeeesh - now, I'm confused after reading this blog and the comments. (There's been 3 comments thus far.) Everyone makes sense. However, I thought the two big ones, especially for newbies, were Amazon and Ad-sense, as stated in the Certification training here on WA.

I already can't use Amazon since I live in Rhode Island. If I choose not to use Ad-sense, then I don't have either. My concern is that I thought both were important for newbies to get their money making website(s) rolling. I know there are other affiliate programs out there that pay-out much higher. It's just that I was finally sold on Amazon and Ad-sense due to the training.

I guess I'll just have to test it all out.

I posted my "take" but snagged Vimini Cricket in chat and asked if she'd take the time out to post hers. You'll always get a wide range of "opinions" from the Membership on every subject. I'd certainly give these a read, both are by Vicky:
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/6-ways-to-make-money-with-your-wordpress-blog and:
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/how-to-pick-a-clickbank-product-to-promote

Thanks for the nice comment Richi Rich :)

I wouldn`t get scared away from Adsense if that was your plan from the beginning. Have you created your website? Feel free to PM me and I can take a look at your site to see what would be good to start with - product or Adsense...

Veronica

Thank you so much Rich and Veronica. I'll definitely take a look at the training, and Veronica I'll take you up on your offer. -so nice of you to offer :)

@melaniekaren, Adsense is a good (quick and easy) way to get your website rolling from a $$$ standpoint.

But you should consider that anyone that is clicking on your ads is a potential customer that you could be sending elsewhere.

Also, there are a lot (and I mean A LOT) of stories of people losing their adsense accounts and earnings simply because google felt they were not following the rules. Google contradicts themselves all the time.

As soon as you start making around $1,000 per month be ready to be scrutinized by google.

Test it out until you find alternatives for making money with your website.

Adsense is not the only ad program that you can make money from... there are other alternatives as well media.net is another one that I use but there are lots more.

It all depends on what kind of site you are talking about when it comes to Adsense. The only way to truly know is testing your own site... testing testing testing

It also depends on if you are doing only Adsense or Adsense combined with a product promotion.

If you have created a site with Adsense in mind as your main income for that site, you will probably have a lot higher CTR than 0.1% like the example. I have Adsense sites where it is my main income with CTR around 20 %...
It also depends on what your avarage CPC is, higher CPC more $$$

When I talk about "plain" Adsense sites I talk about informaitional sites or educational sites for example.

If you do a site with Adsense combined with product promotions I would add Adsense to general posts but not to posts talking about your product. But again it comes back to testing...

To do Adsense or not?? That is the question :) the only true way to know if it will work on your site or not is testing.

Wow veronica! a 20% CTR sounds REALLY high! How did you manage to pull that off? That is really impressive!

That's a great point, I will consider creating some websites "strictly" for ad-sense. It will definitely take a while to get over my current ad-sense bias though.

These sites were created with Adsense in mind from the beginning. They are uggly little sites :) yes uggly, where the ads stick out, but they convert like crazy. It is very targeted niche sites they used to rank really well in Google but after the updates they have now dropped in rankings. CTR is still great though...

I have heard that one of the best ways to increase your clickthrough rates is to make your sites "ugly" where the visitor wants to leave as soon as they get there.

I tried this theory out by changing the theme on one of my sites (the font was REALLY small) and the CTR seemed to go up a bit.

Is this kinda what you did?

Care to share a link?

Bravo on doing the math. As a Newbie making even a penny is a thrill. You are an inspiration to everyone starting out. There is hope.

Thanks dazzlefish, I'm a work in progress like everyone else on here! :)

Great post, Kamali, thanks for sharing. I agree 100%. Adsense doesn't really make "sense" any more from a financial standpoint unless you have substantial traffic. I too think it creates a poor "impression" especially on "authority" sites. You can also get highly inappropriate ads against your copy if Google is feeling flakey or more likely wants to "push" high revenue (for them!) ads regardless of your wishes. For example, another Member didn't realise a "Date Asian Babes" style ad was appearing on his "green living" site. http://d.pr/i/OlvY I guess Google doesn't have a "Martian Playmates" ad category so it couldn't provide anything appropriate. :( Rich.

Thanks @RICH. To tell you the truth, I was pretty excited when I got my first ad-sense click. But now I'm ready to try out bigger and better things.

I definitely agree on the "poor impression" point too. As an authority site, once you have a following you have a certain responsibility to your visitors to only present products that you personally support.

With the random google ads there is no telling where you are sending your visitors. And the wrong site could really hurt your reputation.

Good post, I agree with not using Google Ad-Sense most of the time. If you have any type of authority site or plan on having one, I wouldn't recommend Ad-Sense for multiple reasons.

1 of the reasons would be the random Ad's that may show for low quality products or services, which your audience might think you're promoting. Another reason would be that simply most of the time, the ads that are shown are basically just competing against you. There's a few other reasons but I won't make this reply too long.

Simply put, if you're making a small site that's not maintained much or isn't a serious site that you really care about (low earning site that you don't focus on much) then Ad-Sense isn't a problem and might be ideal for that site. It all depends on how you structure your site around it. That's my two cents.

Vextillius, great points! I especially like the reason you gave about the ads being competing sites.

Fortunately, my "options trading" website is really specific so the ads that were presented there were pretty specific to the content of my site. For these reason i did not see too many "unrelated" ads.

I also found that there are certain things to do to tell google to focus on specific areas of a page OR ignore specific areas of a page. I had some success with this too.

Still google is known to be sketchy so I would not doubt that they would still push their own agenda when it comes to Ads.

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