AdSense competing with myself?

[Nicke]

I dont know why, but I have put AdSense on pages and directly competing with myself.

I have a travel destination guide and most AdSense ads is for hotel bookings, which I also offer myself (Affiliate).

I never thought about it, since I make good money both from the bookings AND AdSense.

But now I start thinking why I give away my potential customers to competitors. So I changed my hotel specific pages now and front page and I hope increased earnings from bookings will clearly outperform what I will lose from AdSense.

Anyone with experience about this?

[leadegroot]

You might want to consider banning specific advertisers, who are advertising hotel bookings.

[birdstuff]

But now I start thinking why I give away my potential customers to competitors.

I don't see this is as bad thing. Sure, you're sending a few visitors to your competitors, but in all liklihood they would go somewhere else anyway.

Why do visitors click on links in the first place? Because they didn't find exactly what they were looking for on your site. If they're gonna click away anyhow, why not get paid for it? And if it's your competitor doing the paying so much the better IMO.

[Tropical Island]

Why do visitors click on links in the first place? Because they didn't find exactly what they were looking for on your site. If they're gonna click away anyhow, why not get paid for it? And if it's your competitor doing the paying so much the better IMO.

I agree with this although when I first added AdSense to our sites in mid-March I was concerned that it would have an impact on our vacation rental business.

This has not been the case and, in addition to our AdSense revenue, we are having a great year in our regular business.

I would suspect that most of those who are clicking away on ads would have left the site anyway.

[TravelSite]

If you wanted to be sure you could leave the ads on for a week, then take them off for a week. Then you could see if bookings increased when you removed the adsense, and if so whether they increased enough to make up for the loss of adsense.

[Tropical Island]

TravelSite

Thanks for the suggestion.

The reason we added AdSense in the first place was due to the number of inquiries that we were receiving that we had to turn down either because we were already full or because it was undesirable business. We were trying to figure out a way to maintain our AdWords presence and get a return on these visitors.

I am happy to say that we are still getting approximately the same number of inquiries and are already 80% booked for this summer and next winter.

AdSense revenues pay about 50% of our AdWords / Overture bill each month. For us it's the perfect solution.

[vijayhrb122002]

Hi
I have seen a Ad-filter of Google which helps u to prevent Show up of ads of ur Competetors.
Just goto Ad Settings and u will find.

With Regards,
Vijay.

[Nicke]

Thanks for your comments.

I will do some testing, with and without AdSense and find out what works best for me.

I will report back later.