what to do with wasted traffic

ads on commerce sites.

[JonR28]

Okay, so I have a website that sells very funny widgets. Altho many people laugh at the widgets, some people just choose to laugh and not actually own them... this seems to be the case with a lot of novelty type widgets. The thing is that I don't want to waste bandwidth on people who just want a laugh. My solution before was to install google Adsense so that I get a little return on the extra traffic. Everyone quickly corrected me and told me an Ecommerce site can't have adsense... its a sales leak! In a few weeks I made a good amount of extra money from it and didn't see a sales drop. But none the less I took the advice of my peers and removed the ads for fear of a "sales leak."

So I guess my question is: How do I monotize the traffic that isn't buying the novelty widget?

I don't want to do popunders or anything like that. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks so much in advance.

[bufferzone]

The way I understand things, you can't and you shouldn't

I take it for granted that your site and pages are all optimized for all the important keywords regarding your very funny widgets and that the traffic you get mostly comes from SE's. You have no way of knowing on beforehand who will buy and who will not. Also filtering the “non buyers” might be a bad idea, since some of those “non buyers” might turn into buys later. Don't you look around before you shop? I do. And often I don't choose the first or the last place I visit.

If you sell a good product and your site is well made, they will come back and buy later

[buckworks]

In a few weeks I made a good amount of extra money from it and didn't see a sales drop.

Then keep the Adsense, for goodness' sake!

[shri]

Umm.. if adwords/adsense type ads are good enough for Amazon, they good enough for my online shops.

Do keep in mind that you can use the adsense preview tool to see the potential advertisers on that page, by country AND block any direct competitors should you want to.

<added>Also, if you're US based and don't ship overseas, you ca