Traffic Monetization Program Beta Test Results

Here is a quick follow-up to my post a couple of weeks ago on a new Beta Traffic Monetization System we are testing out on one of our other blogs to see if it can help us make more money online.

To refresh your memory here is basically how the program works:

The program is basically an advertising revenue sharing program, similar to Adsense, but with a cool twist. With this you place keyword text links that you choose right on your website. You can choose high paying keywords if you like, but for my test I chose keywords I know my readers are actually searching for. When a visitor clicks on one of the text links, relevant ads are then displayed right on your website. The site owner then earns money each time a user clicks onto an advertiser’s link.

Here is how the text ads looks on our website MiraMesa.com.

So for the past 2 weeks the site has been averaging between 200 – 300 visitors per day, with about 75 – 80% of that traffic coming from search engines. Below is the earning’s chart which shows you exactly how much the site has earned with this traffic monetization system so far.

As you can see… not the greatest numbers ever, but not the worse numbers either. If the numbers stay like that, we will ending up earning a little over $20 for the month from those ads… which really isn’t too exciting.

We have decided to let the ads run through the rest of the month, and after that take them down, as we can earn more money selling banners ads to local merchants in that same spot.

Here is a list of the pros and cons we have come up with so far:

PROS:

1. I REALLY like the ability to choose our own keywords, as we could choose all high paying keywords if we wanted too. We didn’t for this test, as the blog is an extremely focused niche and we didn’t have a lot of choices, but I could see where it could work very well on some other sites.
2. I also like the ability to display the ads anywhere and anyhow we like. You could display several keywords like we did on that site, or you can just add a text link in a post and that would work as well. The display flexibility is very cool.

CONS:

1. It is not available in all countries, and many of the countries where it is available… they seem to not have a large ad inventory, so not many ads (if any) display. So a website that gets a lot of worldwide traffic, I don’t think it would be too good a fit.
2. Unlike Adsense where you can login to your account and see how your ads are doing every hour, and get a very detailed report… that is not the case with this program. The report information is very limited (as you can see above), plus the report is always 2 days behind. So if I login today (which is Thursday), I will only see my commissions through Tuesday. I really don’t like that!
3. The earnings per click do not seem to be that great either. The problem I think is… this company is using another company (Hotkeys.com) for their backend system and both of them (at least) have to take a cut of the commissions before it gets to us. I believe with Adsense you are only sharing your commissions with Google (but I could be wrong).

So for the time being (for us), the Cons outweigh the Pros… but that might not always be the case. The company is very new and as they grow… they might be able to fix everything that I have listed in my Cons section. If that happens, I would absolutely recommend this company.

As you noticed I never mentioned the name of the company. That is because they are still in Beta Testing mode and it is not available for everyone to use yet.

If you would like to test out the system yourself, send me an email and I will put you in touch with the owner. The only requirement is your site has to average over 300 visitors per day to be considered.