Does Adsense reduce the overall traffic to your site?

[gorfmeister]

I have been using Adsense since its inception in June 2003.

From October 2002 to May 2003, my site's traffic was growing at rate of 5% to 10% a month.

In June 2033 my site's traffic steadily shrank (0% to -5% a month) as the Adsense clicks rose and then stabilized in November 2003.

From December 2003 to January 2004, my site's traffic has now begun to go up again from 5% to 10% a month (and the Adsense clicks are now rising proportionally).

From this data, I conclude that the site lost traffic because of Adsense (less clicks to other pages or discouraged users who saw the ads, ignored the content and clicked to another page).

Anybody else notice something similar (if you were growing at 20% and then only 5% after Adsense would also qualify)?

[loanuniverse]

From this data, I conclude that the site lost traffic because of Adsense (less clicks to other pages or discouraged users who saw the ads, ignored the content and clicked to another page).

Nope that its illogical logic. In order to be correct the only factor affecting traffic would be the presence of adsense ads. Did you also lose unique visitors?

[jomaxx]

It kind of depends on what you're calling "traffic", but obviously if say 5% of people viewing each page click out via AdSense, then it's going to reduce your overall pageviews to some unknown degree. But so what?

[IanCP]

I've noticed nothing significant except perhaps a slight increase in traffic along with good AdSense results.

[gorfmeister]

Nope that its illogical logic. In order to be correct the only factor affecting traffic would be the presence of adsense ads. Did you also lose unique visitors?

You're right, I should have stated that my visitors did not drop ... the number of page views per visitor dropped ... which means it appears that there was an effect. If the consensus is that no effect has been noticed by others, then I'll have my answer as well.

(FYI illogical logic is redundantly redundant ;) ...)

[gorfmeister]

But so what?

In my situation, there are many revenue streams coming from a page (not just Adsense), so a loss of traffic means less revenue from these other streams. If so, that means weighing the revenue loss vs. the revenue gained from Adsense, which is very difficult, since Adsense reporting is primitive.

We are always sensitive whenever we add or change one revenue stream to see what affect it has on all the others.

Less important ... some of it has to do with "bragging rights" (e.g. my site gets X user per month), Alexa rankings vs. competitors and overall marketing of our site to advertisers.

... but the reason for the post is to see if my situation is unique or unrelated to Adsense.

[ken_b]

I have seen the pages per visitor drop roughly inline with the number of adsense clicks. Given that pages per visitor is a pretty hard number to determine with any certainty since I don't use cookies, etc.

Whether that's because of the adsense ads or not is uncertain. But I've made no other changes, so Isuppose it's possible.

Even so, I'm getting paid for those adsense clicks, so I'm not complaining.