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I have mostly travel sites, originally only monetised with adsense. During 2008 I managed to change to about 50% affiliate income, 50% adsense but I'm not sure how much further to 'demote' the adsense for 2009.
In principle affiliates should always do better, but many of the 'major' travel sites have adsense.
Does anyone else have any thoughts or experience of how affiliates and adsense compare on travel sites?
Cheers
Here is a tip: test do what brings more money :D
but generally it's good to keep a few sources of income.
However if you have many affiliate programs there, it's probably better to remove adsense
Thanks for the suggestions
You're right about testing of course, which works well with adsense and 'high volume' items but mostly the things I sell are car rentals and holiday rentals - so things with good revenue but I don't have enough transactions to perform proper statistical analysis eg I might get 3 car rentals and 2 holiday rental booked today, and 1 car rental and 0 holidays tomorrow, but I won't have changed anything, it's just the way it works out.
So if this month I get 50 bookings and next month 25, I can't tell if the change is from improving a landing page, getting rid of adsense, or (just as likely) from things outside my control - the recession, continual google changes, and seasonal factors.
Any suggestions about testing for these kind of items?
The 'too many eggs in one basket' thing is very important as well, like you say, and that is half the battle - to avoid being dependent on adsense.
Incidentally I just added the adsense-analytics reporting a couple of days ago and that should be a big help in seeing pages that I can remove adsense from, when more data has come through.
Cheers
I also run mostly travel sites and do about 70% affiliates / 25% AdSense / 5% other.
I think the most important thing with affiliates is to find one that fits the best. We do most of our affiliate sales through a single affiliate that happens to match our site perfectly. Keep trying out different affiliate programs until you find one that fits.
That's good advice, thanks.
I've settled with about 3 main schemes (cars, hotels, holiday rentals) but I'm always keeping my eye open for new ones.
One issue is that all three of my main schemes are 'direct with the company' type affiliate schemes (ie not through tradedoubler, cj etc) which makes me nervous because I think companies aren't always as honest (or as careful with their tracking) as they could be.
Cheers