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scotch
Joined:
09 Aug 2003
Posts:
28
Location:
South Africa
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Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2006 8:40 pm
Post subject: Adsense alternatives for Photo site
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Good day,
Hoping some of you experienced folk can offer advice about generating ad income.
I have a website featuring mainly African wildlife pictures, plus some articles about photography and wildlife. A big chunk of my traffic (overall about 2000+ unique visitors, 8500 page views a day) is from Google image search.
Although I've been running Adsense for some time, my CTR is not high. Many of the ads, promoting safari destinations and safari lodges, are similar and often repeated on pages. I can't complain about this, as the content on my picture pages usually refers to the game parks where the pictures were taken.
But people looking for a picture of a hyena or baboon are not necessarily interested in going on safari to Africa. They could be doing research, maybe kids needing pictures for projects, or any number of other reasons. Problem is I don't have any valid visitor profile. From the one survey I've done, visitors were evenly mixed male/female and covered every age from teens to seniors.
I've tried a number of different affiliate banners, including travel, photo printing/sharing, wildlife gifts etc, with very little success. The one affiliate program that has been reasonably successful is Art.com, with good CTR and moderate sales, so it does seem that visitors are "visually" inclined and interested in products like art prints and posters.
Now I'm wondering if it's worth trying some other advertising instead of Adsense, at least on some of my pages. There seem to be a number of possibilities - Adbrite, Fastclick, Kontera etc.
Has anyone tried these and, if so, how do they compare with Adsense?
I have this feeling I should be making better use of my traffic, but also can't help thinking they're mostly window shopping and not interested in ads or offers. So any general advice or comments would also be welcome and much appreciated.
Many thanks,
Scotch
_________________
http://www.wildlife-pictures-online.com
- the Net's premier source of wildlife pictures & info |
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Charlie
Joined:
22 Aug 2003
Posts:
3305
Location:
UK
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Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2006 9:34 am
Post subject: Re: Adsense alternatives for Photo site
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| scotch wrote: | | A big chunk of my traffic (overall about 2000+ unique visitors, 8500 page views a day) is from Google image search. |
I can't say I've any real experience of image traffic, but I have a new travel site where images will need to be used, so here's some of my thinking (based on experience of other sites)...
| Quote: | | But people looking for a picture of a hyena or baboon are not necessarily interested in going on safari to Africa. They could be doing research, maybe kids needing pictures for projects, or any number of other reasons. Problem is I don't have any valid visitor profile. From the one survey I've done, visitors were evenly mixed male/female and covered every age from teens to seniors. |
I suspect that most people doing image searches are just looking for images, too. I'm going out of my way to make the site an information resource that happens to get some image traffic, as opposed to a place people come to look at pictures or steal them.
| Quote: | | The one affiliate program that has been reasonably successful is Art.com, with good CTR and moderate sales, so it does seem that visitors are "visually" inclined and interested in products like art prints and posters. |
It depends what you mean by reasonably successful, but it sounds like it could be worse. Ive spoken to other people with travel sites and they all say that the image traffic dilutes their Adsense hopes.
| Quote: | | ...can't help thinking they're mostly window shopping and not interested in ads or offers. |
I have to agree.
At the end of the day, this is more evidence for the words sell (by drawing people in) approach. I tend to look on image search traffic as a nice bonus.
It might be possible for you to use a server side script to identify visitors from image searches and then display them a prominent Art.com affiliate link (ideally pre-built with their search term), in place of the usual Adsense block.
Also, bear in mind that even if you start getting Adsense clickthroughs that aren't working for your advertisers, this might work against your overall payout from Google, anyway.
Hope this helps,
Charlie.
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scotch
Joined:
09 Aug 2003
Posts:
28
Location:
South Africa
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Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2006 6:50 pm
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Thanks Charlie - your comments are all valid and certainly apply to what I'm finding, particularly Google payout.
After including the max permissible Google ads on as many pages as possible, my earnings climbed nicely, but after a couple of weeks have been on a steady decline, presumably because they're not working for advertisers.
I hear what you're saying about text content. Main problem is my site was never intended primarily for Adsense, but rather as a vehicle to sell stock photos. But since I set it up, dozens of new sites have emerged that offer stock pics for pennies, using images from thousands of emerging digital photographers.
So I guess I can't complain, but was hoping there was a better way of making use of the window shopping visitors.
At least you're aware of the image search problem, so won't be deluded by visitor numbers. Good luck with your travel site.
Kind regards,
Scotch
_________________
http://www.wildlife-pictures-online.com
- the Net's premier source of wildlife pictures & info |
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