Does AdSense Work on Ecommerce Sites? - Ads On Weblogs
Interesting post on Inside AdSense which talks about whether AdSense on an e-commerce orientated web site can affect sales. My first instincts would be to say that of course it has to, afterall every AdSense click takes potential buyers away from your site.
But maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. The example stated on Inside AdSense refers to a French video on demand site called Imineo.com. According to the co owner of Imineo “Our business model is not based on advertising revenue, but in order to increase our AdWords spend, we wanted to use AdSense.”
As Imineo implemented AdSense on their site, it was noticed that “qualified visitors came to the site with the intention to buy the videos and did not click on the sponsored links, while other visitors usually clicked on one of the relevant ads.”
I guess this makes perfect sense. Traffic to web sites is I guess split roughly into two types.
1. Those who are curious and want to have a look around for useful information. These are the ones who are likely to click an ad.
2. Those who have arrived at the site through a very specific keyword combination that classifies them as “end of point” consumers. i.e they are probably long tail, know what they want and when they find it their gonna buy it.
It’s an interesting dichotomy and whilst I buy that this can happen on some ecommerce sites I still think that AdSense maybe a distraction on others. Like most strategies with AdSense their is not a one “shoe size fits all” application. More often than not you have to tailor and mould your AdSense strategy around your web site.
Nonetheless, the point made by Inside AdSense is
“Imineo’s strategy highlights how e-commerce sites can use AdSense to monetize traffic that usually exits the site using the URL address bar.”
If you own an e-commerce site, Inside AdSense provide a couple of suggestions:
• Try testing AdSense first on your exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your sales.
• If, like Imineo, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not affect your conversions, we encourage you to increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. The additional revenue coming from AdSense can help you generate more qualified traffic and therefore increase your overall sales.
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