Could Adsense backfire on ecommerce sites?

[Compworld]

Ok, so I have added my Google Adsense leaderboard right smack in the middle of the screen. Its right above the categories, so you cannot miss it. Now, when a visitor is browsing the categories and items that are for sale, could I (or in this case we as merchants) be losing out on the sale due to the fact that the Google Adsense is taking the business away from us?

CompWorld

[europeforvisitors]

Sure. The real question is, "Will the advertising revenue offset the lost sales?" Testing is the only way to find out.

[Compworld]

Yeap. I guess testing it in the holiday season. Hope I am wrong though.

CompWorld

[richmondsteve]

Compworld, if you have the ability to test, you can implement for a subset of your visitors only, track and analyze. The key is to know:

1. The split of visitors who had AdSense shown to them vs those who didn't.

2. The ecommerce revenue split between the above two groups.

With cookies and/or session variables this is trivial so long as you either do ecommerce internally or have a way to pass a variable to the affiliates you sell through. Then it's just a matter of comparing the total revenue per visitor from the two groups to decide whether it's more profitable with AdSense or without.

I do this type of testing for clients all the time. If you want to go that route and have questions feel free to post them.

[lgn1]

We run a ecomm site selling consummer goods, and we have put the adsense ads on the home page only, but not at the top but more towards the middle.

We have not lost any sales. Either two things are happening:

a) people are clicking on the adsense ads as they found nothing of interest on our site.

b) They are hitting the back button to our site, after finding nothing on the adsense linked site.

I guess if we put the adsense ad on every page, we would have more click-thrus, but also an increased risk of losing a customer who was in the process of buying. We have a theory of never providing a distraction for a customer from giving us their credit card information.

Generally new users find us via our home page, where repeat shoppers usually bookmark us from an internal page.

So we are skiming adsense sales off of the customers that are unlikely to buy from us.

Also it takes about 5 visits for a customer to buy something off the web (don't ask me where I got this, it was quoted a few years back in a merchant survey). At least this way you are making some adsense sales, during the consumer decission making process.

[richmondsteve]

lgn1, you said you haven't lost any sales, but how do you know?

[lgn1]

I should say we haven't loss any sales based on statistical analysis of the data we have collected. If we have lost a few sales, it is within the statistical noise of being insignificant, and is far outweighted by our adsense revenue.

[Compworld]

This weekend was less than normal on registrations and sales. Both seem to have picked up a bit yesterday. So I was thinking that Google Adsense may had been a cause. It seems now that it was just people we probably not home or in the malls for shopping.

Here's hoping for a good shopping season for all of us. Only time will tell.

CompWorld

[lgn1]

The American Thanksgiving long weekend has traditionally been very poor for ecommerce sales for us. I think that a lot of people are either travelling or doing the family thing,or at the malls. Don't based your decisions on this pass weekend.

[shrirch]

You have to figure that a number of users will purchase from you and a number will exit your page without purchasing.

The trick is to get someone to pay, for your visitors to move to the next site.

One of our larger "ecommerce affiliate sites" has not seen any drop in conversions (infact we're seeing an increase following thanksgiving) when we placed AdSense -- blended in with the background, borderless on the right margin.

The trick is to figure out how your visitors enter. Do they enter your site using generic searches - "cheap widgets" or do they enter it using specific searches "brand name widget model number". My testing leads me to belive that generic searchers will convert less and may be more inclined to click on an adsense advert and move on, IF your copy or your entry pages are not attractive.

If your searchers enter in using very specific searches, they are more likely to have their wallets open and credit card on the keyboard (thats how I search when I'm shopping) and are likely to convert to sales.

Finally, take a look at some cheap geotracking software. Consider showing AdSense adverts to users who are not from your target country / continent. There are merchants and affiliates who would pay for them through AdSense.

Send me a private message if you want more info on the geotracking software.

[Compworld]

Everyone has made good points, and the sales go coming back to normal levels, I had just thought that this weekend would have been better then a normal weekend. That is all.

CompWorld