Do you really lose customers with Adsense

How many customers hit the back button after viewing ads.

[lgn1]

We have a very healthy adsense CTR rate on our eccomerce site. Some of the adsense advertisers are competitiors, but their prices and site design suck, so I don't consider them real competition.

I have been assuming that the users are hitting the back button, and returning to our site, but I have no way of telling as our site does not use cookies. Our sales are not hurting and now we have two revenue streams.

Is their anybody out their using persistent cookies on a eccomerce site that can provide information on what percentage of customers return (via the back button or otherwise) after viewing an adsense ad?

[Kinitz]

I don't think that customers returning is a good thing for AdSense. For AdSense it is best that you have maximum number of unique visitors and not just a small number of sticky visitors... so actually just take care that your content is good, rather than bothering about tracking of returning visitors (who have the same cookie)!

[justageek]

It depends somewhat on your site but more importantly on what the consumer is interested in. I've been involved in some usability testing of visitor patterns and the results were mixed, and interesting.

It seems that if the consumer is interested in making a single purchase of a product then we saw clicks go out to ad sites for price comparisons. So the consumer would click on all the ads that interested them which meant they came back to the original site after checking prices on the first ad and then clicked the second one and came back after checking prices and so on. Now once the prices were checked the consumer did one of two things. Either bought from the content site or went back to the ad with the best price. Either way you got one click unless the time between clicks went past the multiple click checking times then you might get credit for more.

If a consumer was interested in a package purchase meaning buying a trip might involve airline tickets, hotel reservations, clothing for the destination, luggage etc. then the pattern was different. Consumers typically would just click on one ad and go because of the limited number of ads and no incentive to come back. In this scenario you got one click also but less of a chance of a sale from your site.

The package purchaser type consumer led to the creation of a catalogue ad block from the company I helped with the studies. This allows for multiple sources of advertisers to be within a catalogue that stays on the content site. What happens with this is that it starts out as plain text links that are contextually related but isn't limited to just the standard 4 or so ads. It allows for many ads and information so a consumer does not have to leave the content site. With the catalogue the visitor could make airline reservations, hotel reservations, buy luggage etc. The effect of this was 'stickyness' to the content site while allowing the content site to get credit for every purchase.

In other words, if AdSense shows ads for a site selling airline tickets the content site would get money for one click but not for everything else the consumer purchased because the consumer just left and never returned. There was no reason to return since the ads were for airline tickets so it would not be of any help to come back if they need to purchase luggage now. With the catalogue ad block the content site gets credit for many consumer actions and the consumer came back more often because of the amount of information in the catalogue.

So it really depends on the amount of products the consumer is interested in purchasing which was interesting to me anyway.

JAG

[jomaxx]

With respect to using cookies, there's no way to know if a given visitor has clicked on an AdSense ad, and therefore there is no way to track their subsequent actions.

Personally I wouldn't rely on people hitting the back button and making a purchase from your site. Depending on the tradeoffs you are making, I would remove the ads outright or at least block competing ads.

[lgn1]

Thanks for the responses. Statistically, we are not losing sales, so I can only assume the customers are coming back via a back button or by bookmark.

[adfree]

Losing 80% affiliate sales but only 20% affiliate traffic, replacing with 2000% of revenue from AS.

Site users welcomed the blend-in AS ads as addition to their information needs.

I figured I can live with that...;-))
Cheers, Jens

[GrantNZ]

We may have lost some advertisers for our website (because we are including AdSense code) and we may have lost some customers for sales of our products (as many of the AdSense ads do feature an alternative/competitor), but overall AdSense has/is adding an extra 10% to our income. We also use AdWords.

[europeforvisitors]

I publish an information site, not an e-commerce site, but I do have some affiliate links. And my affiliate sales are growing at the same time my AdSense revenues are growing. There may be some cannibalizing, but if there is, it isn't obvious.

When you think about it, that makes sense. Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that your site has an AdSense clickthrough rate of 5%. That means 1 in 20 readers of any given page are clicking on ads, and the other 19 aren't. Not only that, but some of those 1 in 20 readers who click on AdSense ads may simply be comparing the advertiser's offerings with your own--and if you've got the better product or price, the chances are good that you'll still get the sale.