Adsense Pages Vs PPC Pages at Conceptualist.com, By Sahar Sarid

Adsense Pages Vs PPC Pages

Published on July 10, 2007 in Domain Names.

Unlike the PPC channel, Adsense work with existing content. Although it requires more work and attention to details, the benefits are compelling. This morning I came across one such domain, CustomWheels.com . I like the work the owner has done very much and I think this is really a blueprint to expand. It isn’t the end, rather the beginning.

So Adsense versus PPC Pages, here we go:

1. Design. With Adsense pages You have more flexibility. If you are like most of us, you use an aggregators such as hitfarm.com, DomainSponsor.com, TrafficZ.com, or fabulous.com. With these networks you have not much flexibility as to how the pages look. Not to say you do not have any flexibility, but it isn’t remotely close to having the flexibility to design the whole site.

2. With PPC pages you are not allowed to arbitrage traffic. People do it but as far as I know it’s against Google/Yahoo TOS. With Adsense type pages you can arbitrage as much as you want, as your domain is now treated as a site, not as a placeholder page.

3. PPC networks are not yet flexible enough to give you as many programs as you want, pick and choose. I predict it will be that way sometime in the future where they give their best recommendation of what works and what doesn’t but ultimately it will be your choice to integrate what you feel like integrating, but who knows when that will happen? With Adsense pages you can do it today.

4. Adsense pages are content pages, therefore good for SEO purposes. PPC pages on the other hand are blocked by search engines.

The big downside of adsense pages is the time required to create and manage such sites. As more tools become available, content getting cheaper, and new companies offer one-stop solutions, Adsense may be the better offering, or maybe, just maybe, PPC networks will convert their operations to Adsense networks? That would be interesting, and I predict, highly profitable to everyone.

7 Responses to “Adsense Pages Vs PPC Pages”

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1 Andy Sweet
Jul 10th, 2007 at 9:39 am

Sahar,

Don’t forget that in Google, the advertiser also has the option to modify bid prices (i.e.- lower) for Adsense or completely opt out, resulting in lower EPC for the domains showing the ads.

The advertiser also has the option to opt out of the parked pages as well, but doing so also causes the advertiser to opt out of AOL, Ask, Comcast and other high traffic locations.

Yahoo has a similar setup allowing advertisers to opt out of their YPN/content match network, but does not currently allow advertisers to opt out of the placeholder/parked/PPC domains.

-Andy

—-ANSWER—-

Thanks for the added info Andy.

Sahar
2 Gordon
Jul 10th, 2007 at 10:55 am

I will say that this adsense site is better than 99% of all other adsense sites.

PPC from adsense is generally lower, but the long term upside is better IMO.

Upside:

- Search rankings - customwheels.com probably gets a lot of search traffic from a well designed site with good content.

- Value to a buyer. To someone who is about to build a “real” site and wants to buy the domain, a site that google has seen live and updated for a few years definitely has more value than a parked domain.

Downside:
- time to build a site like this.
- often lower revenue than with straight parking cos.

that said, i have a few sites like this (just uglier!) that make about 50% of what they did parked. Hopefully the search traffic will arrive to help out, but i still think I’m better off waiting for the guy who wants a site that won’t be stuck in the sandbox for 9 months….
3 DP
Jul 10th, 2007 at 11:18 am

Consensus seems to be that the top tier names, those getting thousands of type-ins a day (not expired link traffic which will eventually go away), are better off as a single page of ads.

For everything else, development is very attractive. Sure, CTR will go down with more content on the page to distract the user from the ads, but I’d rather have 5% CTR on 5,000 uniques a day than 30% CTR on 100. A well developed page like customwheels.com is going to get word of mouth referrals, people booking marking it on places like delicious and stumbledupon and may even attract some direct advertising deals. None of this is going to happen for a parked page. How many people bookmark parking pages? How many return to the same page?

I don’t know about you guys, but spending hours a day scanning drop lists is a less attractive proposition with every week that passes - drop quality gets lower while bid prices go higher. It’s hard to stop and just accept that the domains you own today are all you’re going to own other than the occasional opportunity that comes your way via forums/direct contact to owners of specific domains and a hand-reg here and there, but I mentally get a little closer to that every day….
4 Lee Hodgson
Jul 10th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

Hi Sal,

Long time no chat

We recently experimented in turning a smartname parked page into a “fully” developed Adsense website, http://www.truckrental.com - CTR has gone down from around 100% to 42%, and revenue per click is down from $0.70 to $0.20.

The upside is the search engine traffic - but even though we are top 5 at msn for “truck rental” and other related searches, it still isn’t bringing in enough bacon to make up for the reduced clickthroughs and PPC rate.

Moral of the story is: parking pages can convert very well, both in terms of CTR and income per click. If you intend to develop a real site instead, you’d better know what you are doing inside out, otherwise a loss is on the cards.

Cheers,

—-ANSWER—-

Ah long time indeed
Thanks for the added info..good to see you’re still around and kicking.
Sahar
5 Tomball TX
Jul 11th, 2007 at 7:33 pm

here ya go - not sure if you’ve read this before or not - but i saved it and try to use stuff like this as “motivation material” for myself. nice piece though - the mans original blog is linked in there as well…

http://www.workhappy.net/2006/06/interview_with_.html

i sent that since it shows the link to his adsense shot… now if you goto http://www.compete.com and run his site for what he’s getting daily traffic wise —- wow… he should be doing double what these checks were for since his traffic has increased quite a bit since last year when this shot was taken of the adsense check… $500k a month isn’t chump change by any stretch - not for workign 2 hours a day and being a solo co….

l8r/enjoy - Z.
6 Seb
Jul 12th, 2007 at 8:10 am

Hi Sahar,

Great site indeed but Adsense ads are blocked by anti-ad tools like Adblock in Firefox. Regular parking links always appear though…
7 jeff
Aug 24th, 2008 at 6:51 am

Hi Sahar,

I got a tip on this site over a year ago and your blog…Thanks in posting customwheels.com and i loved what they had done…from the traffic chart, it looked like it did 15k levels..

now the site is parked, traffic surly eased up…i dont like the estimated traffic companies nor do i really go by them but its an indication somewhat..

i wonder what happened? did there google adsense get banned? did google not like the way it was designed and the wrap around? a lot of unknowns in this and why its parked…or did they dump the type in name and sell the traffic and a domainer got the hold of it and parked it..

was just wondering on this, if you had heard anything?? i spent 5 minutes on google trying find some answers and couldnt find anything..

i loved the site and format of it but I am now confused and was going to show this to a web guy and do a private mini development…

thanks sahar!

cheers,

j