Our reported CTR was about 1%. About 1/3 our adsense ads. The earnings were miserable (eCPM= 0.38). It was good cheap advertising for ebay.

After several complaints about non-relevant ads we were told of an unpublished “10 minute” rule. We were told that if your site did not serve ads for over 10 minutes the keywords used would not be used and generic “hot item” ads would be served.

However, 1 page every 10 minutes is only 144 hits a day. We were doing many times more than that (and auction ads reported such). AND we had some small single page sites that ran below this number that always seemed to have the ads asked for. We came to the conclusion the “10 minute” rule was an excuse for a system that did not work.

The serious problem we had was the non-relevance of ads. When the system worked we got exactly what we expected. However, much of the time the system did not work. The final straw was when inappropriate ads for sexually based products were served to all of our pages. . . We closed our account and removed all the ad code.

If you care about what kind of ads run on your pages do not run Auction Ads.

If you care about income you SHOULD be making a minimum of $5 per 1000 page views. Some pages do $40 or more. So watch your statistics closely.

We run about 10k impressions a day and get about 1% CTR.

You can find out how to get this to happen every time at http://andrewbuonocore.com

Not sure why it won’t show relevant ads, but the CTR is dismal due to the non-relevance of ads. I have the cache plugin activated. Could that possibly be a problem?

Having said that – I’m seeing improvements in the last week so they definitely have potential.

One of the things that makes them difficult to evaluate is that it can take days (and even weeks) to find out how much you earn on any given day because ebay’s payment system is slow and reliant upon seeing who wins an auction (that can take over a week).

For example if you refer the eventual winner of an auction you don’t find this out for a week or so – so while you don’t see any earnings on the day itself you might a week or so later. No way around it really – so it means you really need to test them for a month or so.

Today I’m seeing some weirdness with them. Ads are not even closed to being relevant to my one keyword, which has tons of action on Ebay. I’m hoping they get this fixed quickly because my click rates have suffered heavily – gone from 3% down to 1%….

I’m practicing. Just playing with things and learning the ropes. Someday I hope to get 20 visitors a day!

If your site gets 10 visitors a day…why do you even bother with advertising?

It’s no secret that while Google Adsense may be great, it’s not the absolute best way to make money for certain type of blogs. If you’re blogging in a certain niche market, AuctionAds may be your best alternative to Google Adsense.
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It didn’t work out too good for my site. It didn’t display the kind of ads I requested. I requested laptop ads. It showed stuffed animals, sapphire rings, and some Chinese VHS movie. Even after refreshing the page several times, the ads were still just random ones.

So I switched that space back to Amazon ads.

In fairness, AuctionAds says it’s intended for sites that get at least one visitor every 10 minutes (so info about your site remains in its cache or something). My site only gets about 10 visitors per day. Something to keep in mind if you’ve got a low-volume site.

Wow all these comments have been particularly useful and I have found myself visiting a lot of peoples sites and learned a lot. Thank you all!