Tyrone

A few weeks ago, Goggle released their Google Referrals 2.0 program to all their Adsense publishers.

If you do not know what Adsense is, it is basically the Google advertisements that you see on websites. The owner of the website (also called the publisher) earns a share of the advertising fee whenever someone clicks on the Google advertisements.

For Google Referrals, it is a subset of Adsense whereby you can earn a small commission by referring people to some of Googles products or services. The two main services that you can earn commissions from are of course Adwords (Adwords is the program that advertisers join to get their advertisements shown on Adsense) and Adsense.

Some time back, Google actually started experimenting using a pay per lead or pay per sale program for their Adsense Referrals program with a small selected group of people. It was set up in such a way that instead of earning pennies for each click, the publisher may now earn more (or nothing) depending on what the website visitor did after clicking the Google advertisement.

If the person completes the action of either making a purchase (sale) or completing a form (lead), the publisher will earn a much higher amount than the few cents he would have make originally. On the other hand, if there is no action, the publisher doesn't get a cent.

I need to clarify here that the new Google Referrals program is not just restricted to Google products. Any advertiser can list their product and quote the amount they want to pay for each lead or sale.

I expect the performance of Google Referrals to change during the initial stages when merchants are still fine-tuning their offers. For example, just last week, I had an advertisement on my website that offered to pay me $2.88 for each newsletter opt-in I generate for him. Today, that advertisement is already gone. The advertiser probably found out that he was losing money offering that kind of money.

As to whether it pays for you to run Google Referral advertisements on your site compared to Adsense, things are pretty uncertain at the moment. You would probably have to test it out for yourself to see which one gives you a higher payout on your website.

You can even have both of them on your website!

The good thing about Google Referrals is that you can select the exact advertisement you want to run on your site. So, it is possible to micromanage and select the advertisements to optimize your earnings. The flip side of it is that if advertisers keep on changing their offers, it will be very hard for you to monitor and really keep track.

I predict Google Referrals to have a great impact on the affiliate marketing industry as it is now possible for any merchant to start their affiliate program by running it completely through Google!

This also means that you can easily promote a product for a merchant even if you have not signed up for their affiliate program. In the past, my affiliate application was always rejected by certain merchants because they only accepted affiliates from particular countries. Now, if these merchants have their advertisements in the Google Referrals network, I can promote their products without the need to sign up as their affiliate.

One bad thing about Google Referrals is that for the time being, the navigation process of selecting advertisements is still a bit not user-friendly. Hopefully, they will improve it soon.

All in all, Google Referrals 2.0 is a exciting new monetization revenue that all publishers should try and experiment with.

Martin Lee is a professional affiliate marketer who promotes a wide range of products in different niches. To find out how you can increase your affiliate marketing income, visit his site to get your free affiliate marketing course.