Forum Moderators: martinibuster
So far, we have been strict and did not put any ads on our pages as we were afraid about losing customers making us more money with sales. Hotel booking is worth more than a click, especially if you have already paid some money for an Adwords click.
However, I am thinking of giving Adsense a try. Before I do that I would appreciate comments from travel site owners who put adsense on their websites next to affiliate links.
Was it a good or bad move for you?
We have AdSense on pages with affiliate hotels, but not on pages in areas with our direct contracted hotels.
Our affiliate reservations have never made that much money and AdSense hasn't seemed to have canibalized them very much. Rough estimate is that any canibalization was made up by AdSense revenue. But your mileage may vary.
My reasons for running AdSense ads are:
1) AdSense travel ads aren't just for hotels (at least, not on my pages). Running AdSense lets my readers see ads for tours, holiday apartments, and other travel products.
2) My hotel partners don't have listings for every destination that I cover, and in some cases the listings that they do have are minimal. If a reader can't or won't book a room in Widgetville through my affiliate partners, I might as well get a click on an ad.
3) For every reader who clicks on an affiliate link, there are many more readers who don't--so why not give them the chance to click on an ad instead? Who knows: Maybe some advertiser's text ad for "Elbonian Nudist B&Bs" will get a click when my Elbonian booking link won't.
4) When I've tested "affiliate income-rich" areas of my site with and without AdSense, I haven't been able to detect any difference in affiliate revenues. (I'm guessing that's partly because some readers like to comparison-shop and also because a lot of ads are for things that aren't covered by my affiliate programs.)
Disclaimer: If I had an affiliate site, as opposed to an editorial site with affiliate links, I might look at things differently. Users expect publications (including online publications) to include ads, but they might be more skeptical about the size, legitimacy, and financial stability of an e-commerce vendor (or an affiliate site, which most users probably think is an e-commerce business) that needs ads to stay in business.
there are no real affiliate links. bookings go through XML solution, so you cannot see what partner you exactly book until you book. that means, we can fully brand the website and content (hotels) as our own.
the website gets around 4k uniques a day and has 0,9-1,4% conversion rate. 22% of the visitors bookmark the website.
we do also offer more than just hotels, i.e.: tourist attraction descriptions, city guides, basic info, etc.
what do you think?
That's exactly how we do it.
About 6K uniques/day for the main site. We started as a content site long before we added hotels, so a lot of people bookmark & link to the content portions.
We also have tours (in-house booking system, no AdSense yet; working on XML expansion) and various other affiliate programs (Amazon and other travel- and niche-related programs), in addition to all the travel/culture/community content.
