AuctionAds

AuctionAds (affiliate) has been around for three months, has gained 17,000 plus partners and is still growing. I joined AuctionAds shortly after they started. I heard about them thanks to Shoemoney, who is part owner of AuctionAds.

If you are not familiar with AuctionAds it is a unique advertising network because it is built on top of the eBay affiliate program. The ads themselves are items available for sale on eBay, chosen by the keyword(s) you enter. Unlike cost per click advertising, like Google AdSense, where you would get paid for every click on an ad, this is cost per action advertising. Meaning, you get paid when someone clicks through the ad and performs an action on eBay, such as a user winning the bid on an item, using a Buy it Now, or creating a new user account on eBay.

AuctionAds in some ways, bridges the gap between affiliate marketing and advertising and offers publishers an easy and quick way of offering their users and readers eBay auctions that are related to the content of their website. You could join Commission Junction and sign up for the eBay affiliate program and offer similar ads to your users, but AuctionAds does the hard work of finding relevant items for sale from eBay and displaying them in standard size ad formats.

The biggest reason to use AuctionAds is the commission level. eBay pays a percentage of the revenue depending on the amount of revenue that is generated. If you join the eBay affiliate program on your own and generate a total revenue of $99, you would get 50%. Getting to the higher commission levels can be difficult on your own. To reach 75% you would need to generate over $3,000,000 on total revenue. Not easy for a small publisher with a few sites to reach that level of revenue. Using AuctionAds though, with over 17,000 partners and growing it has a better opportunity to reach the higher commission levels because of shear numbers. This benefits all the partners since everyone will received the higher commission level. This means that even the smallest publisher will make more money because they will be a part of a larger group that can reach the 75% commission level.

In the last three months that I have been running AuctionAds I have found that they perform as well as Google Adsense ads. I have found that they perform slightly better on websites that have a natural tie in with a product. You need to let them run for a little while before deciding if you want to keep the ads on your site on not because there is a delay between when someone might click through and when the auction ends and they win. It means it is not as instantaneous as some other form of advertising.

Some things that I hope will improve in with AuctionAds includes a better reporting section. I find the flash graph difficult to read. Perhaps if they split it into two graphs. The URL Converter that allows you to make links to any eBay page works well, but it would be nice if there was a method to track impressions for those text links. The code wizard works well, but I would like to see the campaign creation available on the single page code creation page as well. I dislike wizards and would prefer if it was all on one page. It would also be nice if the colour picker on the code generator opened right beside the icon on the page, instead of a new window. Perhaps I am being picky, but these little things make all the difference when you are quickly wanting to get your code for your site.

Over time I expect AuctionAds will start to outperform some other forms of advertising. There are also some great tips on how to optimize the ads on the AuctionAds Blog, so be sure to read through the posts there after signing up.

Update: I found something else that AuctionAds could improve on. They should start to compress the javascript code. This is a common from most ad providers, like Google, and it would decrease load times for the ads. My guess would be that document size could be cut in half if not more.