Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The way I see this is about not wanting to loose visitors for let's say $0.01.
The topic of losing visitors to AdSense advertisers comes up every now and then, usually in combination with the suggestion that an ad click should open the landing page in a new window.
With luck, some visitors who click ads will return to your site (either during the current visit or a future visit), but it's likely that some visitors are "lost" to advertising clicks. And that's as it should be: Advertisers are paying to divert users from your site to theirs.
Is this a problem? For a site that relies solely or mostly on AdSense for revenue, it probably isn't, because earnings from "lost" visitors are likely to be greater than revenue losses from those visitors. But for a site that relies heavily on other forms of revenue, such as direct sales or consulting fees, direct-response ads may be a mixed blessing at best. Such sites might be better off with no ads or with display ads, which are more about branding than about clickthrough and have an industry-wide CTR of about 0.1 percent.
Visitors leave, whether you have ads or not.
The ONLY sites that I have with an average of more than 3 pages per visitor (with or without ads) is forums or new sites where I account for most of the traffic. If it's a forum user, I don't care if they leave, because they will be back.
The way most people operate now is they search, look at the page, then hit back to return to the search engine if they don't find what they are looking for. Few visitors will fall in love with a site enough to look around.
The way I see this is about not wanting to loose visitors for let's say $0.01.
It's my quote. So I want to make sure you all understand it's just a snippet from a post in a very lengthy thread. It's also not my opinion, but more or less an explanation why people vote for minimum CPC. I hope I'm not written off now ;).
But earnings are only one (not so important) side of the story. The other side is the extremely low quality of those ads themselves, the image they create (and that *seems* to be related to the low price, much like a low rent attracts less welcome tenants in motels.)
As for only being able to show 3 pages before visitors leave: that might be a content issue (e.g. not having many content pages, not the content people seek, not friendly to navigate, or just giving them what they seek on the first page).
