As you might know, when you are online marketing there are a lot of numbers to pay attention to. A lot of these numbers you want to monitor regularly. You want to know what your traffic numbers are like, what your profits are, expenditures and etc… Today I was looking at my numbers and I noticed a funny little fact.
On my blog I have adsense and iTunes affiliate program through Linkshare. Linkshare is a great affiliate network and a completely trustworthy company who I recommend to anyone. Since I have a music blog I figured it would make sense to have an Tunes affiliate ad on my site. I had it right at the top of my sidebar, under that I had a small Google Adwords text link.
I was debating which one should be above the other when…
Today I noticed on one of my posts, that one of the Google PPC ads were appearing on one post, only one ad and it was to iTunes. I also noticed someone clicked that ad today, and I was credited with $0.21, not a big number at all BUT it did make me wonder about one thing. When I refer someone to iTunes they usually buy the single song that I recommend (well most people just click and do nothing but the small percentage who buy, buy one song). In most cases I get about $0.09 and that is only IF someone buys.
I ended up removing my iTunes altogether and installing a larger (skyscraper) Google Ad to top my sidebar. I have already noticed an increase in ad clicks/revenue because of it.
Now I know there is some risk involved, because someone could have bought an album on iTunes after following my link and I would have gotten much more than the AdSense click, but since I had only been selling single songs so far, I didn’t expect that trend to change suddenly.
I just found that this was a funny coincidence. It isn’t indicative of anything shady or anything like that, both Google and iTunes are doing what they should be. It just seems like the market dictates that an Adsense click is more valuable than a single song purchased. The only conclusion I drew from this is that I had to change my ad layout, and that move is paying off. If I didn’t pay attention to my numbers, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.
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