Were the items a good match for the content--similar to what you saw there in an ordinary AdSense Adblock?

I tried Referrals in a section of my site where they should have done well, where the ads were a good match. And the CTR was actually not as good as it had been, and I got very few conversions. I do better with regular content-matched ads....

Adsense Referals have had a lot of bad press from the many people I've discussed them with.

I have a shopping, merchandise type page and I put items such as "Free New Baby Items", nightware, beauty care... items that I would assume the female shopper may go to the mall for. I am not concerned that I don't have any conversions, I am mostly concerned that I do not have any clicks at all in about 300 impressions.
Thanks

Jamie

Jamie,

Sounds to me like the problem is that your page is very general, and you've guessed at what might be items of interest. But they probably only interest a fraction of the visitors to that page.

A page with a more specific topic and ads on that topic might do better.

But as I said, I'm not crazy about referrals.

Thinking about it you may be right. I just did not guess the right product. I think I will replace and try on a more specific page as you suggested. Thank you for your help.

Jamie

I've been trying for over a year to make Google's referrals work, and they just plain don't. If they can't devote enough attention to do it right, they should just plain not do it.

I've had success with one site and one product.

On the other hand, I've had no success on a different site with a different product that appeared would work with the same success rate as the site above, go figure.

I tried referrals for a month. I had people click on them, but never made any money because the desired action was apparently not taken. They were highly targeted, and should have done well; they just never did. My CTR for the regular ads is about 15-20%, so I think the issue is in the referral follow-up.

For example, one of the referrals wanted people to sign up for an email newsletter. But the landing page wasn't a sign-up page with all the fantastic reasons you should sign up - it was just the home page. Another was a "Find a (certain specialist) in your city" type which should have been a huge success. However, when I went to the site, it turned out they had only a limited number of US cities - like about 15 very small ones.

I decided to take the referrals off, as people were leaving my site, but I wasn't making any money. I may revisit, but not now.

Adsense Referals have never performed decently for me. So I stopped using them.