Since the advent of Google Adsense, it’s been relatively easy for small business owners with websites to place reasonably looking, page relevant ads on their webpages and earn from them. At times for some, this revenue has been substantial, although those days may be over. Still, the questions remains: If you sell products/services, SHOULD you have ads for other, perhaps competing products and services?
You’d think there would be a clear answer on this but there isn’t, and there are those that argue for one side or the other. Generally, the consensus answer would be NO and that position is buttressed by a number of arguments:
- ads may cause visitors to see you as desperate and less credible
- if you have little control over what ads are shown, there’s a risk that the ads that appear will be inappropriate or even offensive to your customers
- why advertise and promote your competitors, particularly if you aren’t getting much money in return
- generally, ads will detract from and reduce your revenue from sales of your products and services.
- ads may slow down the loading of your pages.
- the revenue earned for most ads simply doesn’t justify the affect on the rest of your business.
These are all plausible but the issue, of course, is whether they apply to YOUR business. There are also arguments on the other side:
- the ad income can be substantial and provide a good cushion if sales falter temporarily.
- the ads, if relevant and contextual, can be seen as an additional service to visitors and they support informational type websites very well.
- ads can be placed so the are unubtrusive and are seen primarily AFTER visitors have seen and read the page content (for example, on the bottom of articles).
- ads don’t detract from credibility since visitors have become so accustomed to seeing them anyway.
Our Approach On E-Commerce and Ads
Our position is somewhere in the middle. We operate a number of sites that were created and based on our articles, and exist to provide easily accessible information on the topic of the website. For example The Performance Management Center contains our material, plus articles from other experts on performance appraisal, while The Customer Service Zone serves the same function for that topic. These (and our other sites) aren not fancy looking or slick, but are designed to inform.
Within that framework we do not see a problem with including ads (primarily from Google Adsense) on pages that are not focused on the sale of our products. We tend not to show ads on the pages that describe our books, for example, but there are ads on pages of links, or articles that are not directly written to sell our stuff.
We do it this way because the ads allow us to continue to provide the informational and instructional content. It costs time and money to find and/or produce, and if we relied only on product sales, we simply couldn’t run the sites in ways that provided such great information.
We limit ads on product pages because we DO believe that by placing them on the page, we’d lose some customers, due to distraction. We don’t want people to leave our product pages, so we limit the options.
However, there’s no way of knowing whether this would work for you. Here’s a few things to consider.
E-Commerce and Ads Guide
- If you have a website with little traffic, or your website is new, don’t put ads on the site if you plan to sell your own products and services from it. You won’t make enough money that way.
- First establish your site and reputation. If you have a “name” people will accept ads more readily.
- Limit ads on any page. One ad block is best.
- Place ads towards the bottom. This will reduce your ad revenue a lot (I have mixed feelings on this one)
- Keep ads completely off your product pages.
- Monitor ad revenue regularly, and always consider whether they are generating enough revenue to make them worthwhile.
- If you have enough traffic and can track sales conversions, you could test the effects of ads on your sales. That’s a great idea, but now we are getting into some time consuming activities.
- Make sure that any code that contains third party ads can be either easily removed, deactivated or altered by using server side includes, or an ad serving system or template/library system (a la dreamweaver), so you don’t get stuck having to manually change the codes on hundreds of pages, particularly if you want to remove the ads.
- Monitor the ads being shown to determine their appropriateness. In Google Adsense you can block ads you don’t like (although the process is far from perfect).
- Follow your own heart and mind. If you hate ads, and you believe ads will damage your reputation, don’t get seduced into using them (unless the revenue potential is high)
Postscript: In case you are wondering about how much it’s possible to earn, in the past we’ve pulled in in excess of $3,000 a month just via Google Adsense. Those days are long gone, but there is still money to be had. However the chances of making substantial money putting ads on a products/service promotional site are close to zero now, if you are just starting.
