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Reply With QuoteHi Paul,
Nice site you've got there. Speaking from personal experience the main problems with local diretcory sites are that it can be difficult to get any significant traffic volume and they're high on the maintenance side. Visitors are not looking to buy something over the net but for local information instead. Clicks and conversions from drive by shoppers will always be a lot less than they would on a specifically relevant / product related site.
Out of those 300 clicks you sent a significant number will be bot clicks and consequently the volume isn't really there to make a proper assessment yet. It's the fact that you have made test purchases that haven't tracked that should rightly ring the alarm bells.
Tracking problems, merchants flitting between networks or making stupid demands are just not the hassles that many website owners have the time to keep up with so I can understand why you may be looking outside the affiliate networks.
In our experience Adsense revenues have been falling for some time and you may find all the restrictions too much hassle for the money they make, but you will find that it produces a steady trickle into the coffers. One big advantage of Adsense is for those site owners who have traffic from lots of different countries and need a simple ad solution that isn't geo-dependent. For Croyweb I'm assuming you have pretty much 100% UK traffic so this advantage goes out of the window. Suck it and see and you'll soon know whether it's for you. Personally I would move them to a more prominent position as they are a bit lost at the bottom of your right hand column.
As for eBay, I think it can work well when other affiliate programmes just don't fit. For some products it converts great. You do need more than just a bog-standard banner though. Try out the search box and use the Editor Kit to show live listings on your site.
Amazon, again, is established and a steady trickle earner. Better to show a keyword selection so you don't have to delete ads for individual products that go out of stock etc.
Don't give up on the networks though. Programs like sunshine.co.uk on Affiliate Future have holiday search boxes that you can integrate with just a few lines of code. You'll also get better lines of communication with companies like these, over a behmoth like Google, should you have any issues.
Without a network you pretty much have to take a merchant's word on face value. I can think of one merchant we had 50,000 impressions for, 1000+ clicks and not a single commission. Their programme is independent. A slightly less relevant merchant (on a network) credited us for 20 sales over the same time period from a similar level of exposure. Whilst the tracking for Amazon and eBay should be solid, you can't say that for every independent programme out there.
Think laterally about what your visitors may be interested in and look to generate a steady flow of smaller commissions. If your Croydon business owning visitors don't have a website yet why not encourage them to get a domain name, some hosting and website builder package. If your visitors are interested in local history then there are dozens of Croydon related old maps, postcards etc. on eBay, aswell as everything else under the sun. Try ads for stuff that can easily be bought via the web and not on Croydon high street - tickets for London concerts etc.
Why not reserve some of your banner spots for local companies and offer them on a monthly basis. To them your website is a pretty good place to show an advert to people who might actually visit their shop or use their services. You won't be able to charge a lot, but a few pounds per thousand exposures and having more relevant banners on your pages is a decent use of space.
Hope some of this has been of use and all the best with the site
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