Click Payouts
November 28, 2005 – 12:54 am
I've spent the whole of today staring at a tiny number of clicks making a tiny amount of cash (I could probably pick up more between the house and the car). Yet in the last hour my adsense earnings updated and made my eyes open for the first time since the Swish site went live. Now I know I'm not meant to discuss clicks and figures so we'll use algebra (well I am a mathematician afterall!). For the first part of the day I had x number of clicks making y cents. Then 1 extra click made y * 10+ times earnings. I know anyone who deals with using adsense will probably understand what I'm saying, basically why is it that on the same web site you can make anything between 1c and over $1 in a click? And more to the point, how do I get the higher paying adverts on every page??!! I've started to rewrite my current page text and add more content to the internal pages, targeting better phrases on each page, hoping to bring in the higher paying ads. I know the media partners bot from google reads your site and then determines the likelyhood of the advert displayed being clicked on and more to the point making a sale via that click.
I've made more on this site with 2 clicks than i have with 30-40 clicks on my swish site - it's just very frustrating. Unfortunately I don't have the time to download the new version of the software and play around with it to give me the knowledge to write any articles, plus my content writing is bad enough as it is! The only help I can offer is with PHP but I don't think you can use that with Swish, just Flash.
To add to this, the Amazon links are for Amazon UK and of course most of my visitors are from the US. I've looked at signing up with amazon.com (I'm sure once a long time ago I had…!) however the options available for payments is amazon.com credit, a cheque for $100 less $8 fee ($8 to write a bloody cheque?!!) or else payment into a US bank account. Handy that last one 
I'm thinking about the options and if I did set up with amazon.com as well (I can't seem to find any other book site selling the book) then I guess the account credit would be used for stuff. Of course a cheque for $92 would be better than nothing, but I just feel that 8% of it going back into amazon's pocket is a bit much. Still I have a lot of looking around to do once the busy period of work is over with, I've just not had a great deal of time to research stuff, plus I get paid more per hour by clients than I currently do by my sideline sites so I can't justify the time at the moment!
2 Responses to “Click Payouts”
Different advertisers will pay more to Google to get more/better placement. That's why you get such a fluctuation between value of clicks.
It is possible to target Ads, but it is against Google ToS (for now at least). The only thing you can do is make better use of keywords within your pages and maybe try the targetting suggestion code ?
By Gary on Nov 28, 2005
I competely missed your post on that originally! Possibly due to my hectic schedule of work and travel around that time. It's an interesting point that I didn't realise however until I add content to every page I can't see it making much difference to me. But once the content is written (this side of christmas if I'm lucky) perhaps I can test it and see.
As for the target Ads, I'll give that a miss
Thanks for the links
By Sarah on Nov 29, 2005