If you are a website publisher making money solely on Adsense, conversion rates don’t mean much. If you are selling your own product or are an affiliate, they do.

Conversion simply means turning traffic into customers. Conversions matter to everyone. If an advertiser can convert traffic better they will pay more for advertising.

The past few weeks I’ve been working on promoting an e-book I wrote. I’ve been running an Adwords campaign, getting search engine traffic, and promoting it through one of my pages. Two weeks ago the conversion rate was about 1:87. Last week, nothing. I didn’t change anything. Traffic was about the same.

Finally I decided to do some investigating. It turned out that Paypal had changed its payment landing page. The way the page was laid out would be confusing to someone without a Paypal account. Confusion kills conversion.

The good news is that it appears as of today Paypal has rolled back to the old page. Good for them. In the meantime I switched over to Clickbank.

If you run an entertainment or video game site please contact me. The e-book pays a little over $20 per sale. I can pre-sale pages and any other promotional materials all while minimizing any loss to you from Adsense or other advertising revenue.