Google Adsense Referrals Program Review

Darren Rowse at problogger.net takes a look at the Google Adsense referrals program to see how it has performed in the last year. In his post he comes to the conclusion that his experience with Google’s AdSense referrals is pretty poor.

I decided to take a quick look at my own stats for the program. I started using Adsense referrals on the 26th november 2005 and I’ve used them in the same places since. But just as Darren, I haven’t seen great results from it… I’ve had 1 “sale” / adsense sign-up payout in that entire period. Considering that I’ve delivered a low four digit amount of clicks then it really isn’t much.

So what could be the reason for the lack of performance? Well, here’s some things I believe could be better.

More creatives/banners
The CTR and conversion rates are way too low… I blame the low CTR on the lack of varied creatives - when you’ve seen one you’ve pretty much seen them all. And with so many publishers using them I must conclude that the market for sign-ups for Google’s products is saturated.

Higher payouts
In my opinion the payouts are much lower than any close equivalents. E.g. with many other CPA / affiliate networks you’ll get paid a percentage of the earnings of the affiliates you refer. In total that would most often end-up being more. And with the payouts for picasa and firefox I’d earn much more by promoting for example various adware removal / anti virus tools.

Longer time-limits
Just as Darren says:

…in my humble opinion (ie the reality is that many (most?) new AdSense publishers don’t earn the $100 required to trigger a payment in their first 180 days and that most new AdWords advertisers don’t spend $100 in their first 90 days.)

Those time limits could easily be doubled if not more. And really, the actions are based on when people have earned or spend an amount of money. Google has pretty much earned the money before they’d had to pay for the referrals, so why is that time-limit so low..?

Anyway, it was nice to check out the performance of this since I realized that I’m probably wasting good ad-space. So when I get the time I’ll probably change those promotions to some better paying ads.