In more than 10 years as publishers and developers of Advanced Ads, we have tested and integrated many ad networks. We have seen only a few networks thrive and many more vanish entirely. The following page contains a few ad networks that have worked for us or some of our users.
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Our main criteria for the ad networks on this list were:
- they could outperform AdSense (which depends on the location and the topic of the website)
- their technical support is, in general, reliable
- and they are relatively simple to set up (depending on the features used)
Amazon Associates – Amazon’s affiliate marketing program
Without question, Amazon is the largest and most trusted online store on the planet! With countless products and customer reviews, Amazon has become the go-to shopping destination for the masses worldwide.
Thanks to its excellent refund policy and customer service, Amazon enjoys unparalleled trust and loyalty among its customers. And for publishers who relay affiliate traffic to Amazon, this translates into fantastic conversion rates that are hard to beat.
If your website features product-related content, Amazon’s affiliate program is a must-join opportunity. Remember that commissions on referred sales can vary depending on the product category, ranging from 1% to 12%.
Fortunately, signing up for Amazon’s affiliate program is a breeze, and the benefits are well worth the effort. However, it’s essential to note that you must register individually for the respective Amazon store that corresponds to your target audience’s location, such as Amazon US, Amazon UK, or Amazon NL.
Booking.com
The Booking.com affiliate program is the right choice if you run a travel or destination website. With a range of widgets like a deal finder or a map widget, and the ability to create deep links to search results, city and country pages, or specific hotel pages, the Booking.com affiliate program offers a lot of flexibility for website owners.
The commissions are based on turnover and can range from 25% to 40% of the commission Booking.com receives for each reservation. It’s an excellent way to earn passive income while providing your users with a great booking experience.
Just ask our colleague Joachim—he trusts Booking.com to monetize his travel sites and generates four-digit monthly revenue from hotel bookings.
- Sign-up for the Booking.com affiliate program
- Tutorial: How to implement Booking.com ads into WordPress
GetYourGuide
Target travel enthusiasts with the GetYourGuide affiliate program. This leading platform curates tours, activities, and attractions worldwide, earning you a commission on every booking your website generates. GetYourGuide boasts a competitive commission rate of up to 8%, along with diverse ad formats like banners and widgets, allowing seamless integration into your website’s design. This program is precious for travel blogs, destination guides, and websites catering to adventurous audiences seeking unique experiences.
Advanced Ads is the ideal solution for embedding and optimizing GetYourGuide ads, ensuring precise targeting and increasing revenue potential for your site. Leverage GetYourGuide’s global reach to connect with potential travelers actively searching for your recommendations, ultimately generating passive income while enriching your website’s content.
- Sign-up for the Booking.com affiliate program
- Tutorial: How to integrate GetYourGuide ads into WordPress
Google AdSense
Google AdSense is often the first ad network you will get in contact with. We enjoyed working with their team when integrating dedicated support for their ads. Thomas also experienced the great food served in the Dublin headquarters, making the rest of the team quite jealous.
AdSense is a great starting point for learning how to manage ad units and improve their performance by running tests. The large number of advertisers bidding through them ensures they pay relatively well. While we recommend testing other ad networks and monetization strategies, AdSense can always serve as a benchmark for ad revenue.
Our dedicated AdSense integration lets you pull ad units, revenue reports, and warnings directly from your AdSense account into your WordPress backend. You can embed both regular as well as AMP Auto Ads and automatically build AMP-valid ad tags without touching any code.
By enabling features like Click Fraud Protection or Lazy Loading, you can protect your account from invalid traffic and improve the loading time of your website.
Google AdSense alternative with affiliate links
Unlike the other recommendations on this page, this AdSense alternative is not an ad network that offers publishers ad codes and later remunerates impressions or clicks.
Instead, we use this name to refer to a method for integrating affiliate text links reminiscent of Google AdSense text ads. However, no cookies are stored here, so you don’t have to ask for your users’ consent before showing these ads. Also, these kinds of ads are more resistant regarding ad blockers.
Instead of a single ad network, you can integrate any number of affiliate links from different affiliate programs into your website and target them precisely to your content using display conditions. This way, you can optimize your ads for the highest possible click-through rates and the highest number of conversions.
Ezoic
We have seen Ezoic grow from simply optimizing display ads to being a platform that helps with page speed, SEO, or gathering cookie consent. Their monetization features now include fully automatic ad placements, optimization, and testing. Most of these services are free of charge.
Our founder Thomas was initially overwhelmed when he tested all the features on his travel website. But then he quickly realized how many other services and plugins he could replace with it. If you are experienced in managing web projects and know the value of the mentioned features, we recommend testing Ezoic with one of your next projects.
OKO Ad Management
The OKO ad network specializes in header bidding. As a certified Google Publishing Partner, it provides subsidiary access to Ad Exchange (AdX), considered the “big brother” of AdSense.
Typically, a website must have several million monthly users to be approved for Google AdX. Therefore, this inventory is out of the question for most small and medium-sized websites.
Even though OKO is not as restrictive as AdX, it still requires that your website meet some minimum content, design, and performance standards. But the biggest hurdle, however, is that your site must count at least 2 million page views per month.
For providing AdX access, OKO Ad Management keeps a commission of 15% of all revenue generated through your account. However, the network should be able to compensate these costs with correspondingly higher revenues quickly.
Setupad
Setupad is a European ad network specializing in header bidding and programmatic ads. It allows medium and large publishers to quickly implement the header bidding technology to offer ad spaces to over 20 Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), including Google.
Due to greater competition between multiple bidders for the same ad space, publishers can earn more revenue than by connecting their websites exclusively to one network.
Thus, Setupad guarantees an increase in revenue of at least 30% compared to Google AdSense when publishers implement the network’s recommendations. According to Setupad, most customers achieve even more significant revenue increases. There are no additional costs for the publishers. Setupad works on the revenue share model.
Setupad uses ad placements compliant with the Better Ads Standards, including sticky and anchor ad formats for desktop and mobile. Here, you can see all available ad formats at a glance.
We recommend testing Setupad to check how high the actual revenue increase will be in the end. The average eCPM depends on many variables, e.g., the traffic origin or the thematic focus of the website. Setupad works best on websites with traffic from the USA or the EU. Furthermore, the website must comply with Google Publisher policies and not have violated them in the past.
Sites with more than 1 MM page impressions
There are a lot of ad networks that only accept websites with a huge amount of traffic. Some require more than one or even three million monthly page impressions.
You can find a list of ad networks and partners verified by Google AdSense on their Google Publisher Partners website.