Well, it’s been 2 weeks since I began my InfoLinks experiment. It’s still a little early to tell whether I’m going to keep on with it or not, but the early feeling is leaning against keeping it. I’ll continue it for at least a month though. It may surprise me. But let’s have a quick look at how things stand right now.
Performance
The first week was pretty rotten. A click through rate of 0.00% isn’t quite stellar. The last week though was somewhat better with a 3.00% CTR per page. That gives me an average over the 14 days so far of 1.81%.
As for the PPC, it seems pretty low. I know that I’ve been getting a lot less with AdSense in the past few months, so advertising rates must be down quite a bit. But this is still substantially lower than the AdSense rates so far.
To be fair, my daily traffic to this blog isn’t spectacular so that may have an impact.
Admin
The administration of InfoLinks isn’t as mature as I’d like to see. The session times out quite quickly and rather than just bringing up the login screen, they bring up a screen telling you the session is timed out. Then there is a link to log in. I’d rather have them bring me directly to the login with a message there.
And another quirk is that the login button itself is not triggered when you hit enter. You have to click it with the mouse or tab to it and hit enter (space doesn’t work either as with most HTML buttons). This is not in line with the standard HTML form behaviour.
The reports are only available once a day (although there was one day when the report for the previous day wasn’t available). So you can’t check your stats as often as you might with AdSense (which may be a good thing for some of us stats junkies 8=).
I only have one site in the experiment so far, so I’m not sure if it will break out the different sites if you have multiple ones. But looking at the format of the report I see there isn’t really room for that. If I decide to go forward with this experiment beyond the first month I’ll add another site and see how the reports change.
The Ads
I’ve looked briefly at the ads that show up when I visit the site. Some of them are targeted to the niche of the post, but some are just out there. For example, I had one that linked to the word words with a link to some sort of dictionary site. It matched keyword-wise but had nothing to do with the actual post.
I’ve also found the links in the comments. I think there is a way to disable that, but I’m not sure if I need to.
If you’ve explored the site a bit and have some comments to make on the way the ads show up and affect your experience I’d be glad to hear from you, either in the comments or send me an email. User feedback would be very helpful. And don’t be shy — if you hate them let me know. If you think they’re great then share.
Conclusion
It’s premature to make any decisions yet. There are things that I like about it and things that I don’t. I’ll need to weigh the pros and cons in a couple weeks. If you are interested in trying Infolinks for yourself then give it a go. It is free to use and they have a WordPress plugin to make it simple for bloggers to add.
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Tags: advertising, infolinks
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One thing is sure about Infolinks, they pay because I received my first payment as a publisher last month. 🙂