Is affiliate marketing profitable?

Before we can answer the title query, it's worth explaining what affiliate marketing actually is. It's hard to find a single, objective definition of the term, but in my opinion the most accurate description is that it is a process in which we receive a profit for recommending a given product or service.

 

Before we can answer the title query, it's worth explaining what affiliate marketing actually is. It's hard to find a single, objective definition of the term, but in my opinion the most accurate description is that it is a process in which we receive a profit for recommending a given product or service. Such a profit is most often a commission in the form of a fixed percentage of the price of a purchased product or a predetermined amount per click or a certain action. The article will present other methods of monetizing a site and compare them with affiliate marketing.

Monetization of the site - Adsense

One of the most common and well-known methods of monetizing a website is the AdSense program, which allows us to display ads on our website. We earn most often for ad clicks and it is an average for Poland of 0.11 euros per such action. Some time ago, let's assume before 2020, this was quite a profitable form of monetization. Users were more likely to click on banner ads and a small percentage of visitors had an AdBlock plug-in. Today, only 3 out of 100 users click on banner ads. Translating this to a larger scale, we will only manage to earn 33 euros per 100,000 impressions. In addition, users are more likely to leave our site if we attack them with a large number of ads that obscure content for them to read. We may also lose in the eyes of the algorithm, which may downgrade the position of our site due to the percentage of rejections and the quality of the content.

Monetization of the site – Adsense vs affiliate marketing

We have provided rates for the Polish-language site, as we would like to conduct an analysis of the profitability of affiliate marketing for our new Cyberanking site. Given the above statistics of the profitability of the Adsense program, we have completely abandoned this method of content monetization. We believe that affiliate marketing is better for the website, but also for the content viewer. The user in this case receives something in return, more specifically, useful knowledge. The website earns money when it has actually provided relevant and valuable information and the visitor has made a purchase decision. In addition, we do not risk that the attempt to monetize content will increase the percentage of rejections or lower our position in the eyes of the browser algorithm.

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What matters most, however, is how much you can earn from such activities. We cooperate with the Polish service Ceneo, which pays us per click-through to the offer page of a given product, and the service Tradedoubler, which pays a commission for a purchase in the store of any of their partners. Taking into account the statistics from Google Search Console, Analystics and the dashboards of both of these programs, it came out that we earned €27.57 per 1,000 impressions for clicks and about €5 per 1,000 impressions when it comes to earning from commissions.

 

From our observations, the advantage of affiliate marketing, if only over AdSense, is huge. We will earn as much from 1,000 impressions in affiliate marketing as we would for 100,000 impressions when it comes to banner ads. In addition, we don't risk unwanted side effects such as lowering our site's visibility in Google. We also have control over the quality of the site and what content we advertise. We can realistically influence the successful purchasing decisions of potential consumers. It all depends on the ethics of our actions.

 

As for banner advertising, it is better to approach the subject in a different way. On the "advertising" subpage, we can offer interested people to buy advertising space for a certain period of time. This is certainly much more profitable from a business point of view, and again we have control over what content we present to visitors.