These days Google announced that the product Referrals 2.0 will become available to the most of their publishers. Yesterday I got the chance to have a first look on this new product. The first thing I noticed is that its very easy to use, just like the other Adsense products.

The old Referral product screen is extended with a number of categories where the publisher can choose multiple categories for his ad publishing campaign. From every category it’s possible to preview the advertisers. At this point there was the first “scary” thing! SPAM!

I checked the telecommunication category and found several advertisers for diet pills! I checked some other popular categories and got the same result.
Nice is the feature to select ads for specific countries and languages, but also in other countries and languages the same situation: non related advertisers in multiple categories.

For my first test I created some Adsense code for my new referral ad and placed it on some web page and hello! These ads are looking the same as the regular Adsense text ads. Nice this way the visitor will just recognize some ads by Google. :)
Good points:

  • Easy to use interface, any experienced Adsense publisher doesn’t need to learn (again) how to get the ad code on some web page.
  • A good amount of categories for almost every type of website.
  • The payment is done together with the earnings from other Adsense products (you can reach faster the minimum amount)

Bad points:

  • The categories are spammed by unrelated advertisers (I’m sure some editor will remove these ads after some days but in the meantime you will publish some yunk)
  • Only text ads are available (at the moment), no special ad variations
  • No contact to the advertiser (like on publisher networks like commission junction)

I don’t have good results with the old Google referral products and know that monetizing a website with PPA (pay per action) ads needs much more work than adding some PPC ads to your website. I know a lot of companies supporting their affiliates with the result of higher conversions. I’m sure that every Adsense publisher is able to generate better earnings using PPC ads from Google.

Related links:
Check this thread with some guide for affiliate marketing.
Forum thread about Adsense referral 2.0 at webdigity.com.