Adsense on sites that sell merchandise

Now appears to be a bad move.

[lgn1]

During the slow months of 2003 I would run adsense on my eccomerce site that sells retail goods.

Merchandise was moving slow anyways, and adsense was giving me a good conversion rate, which outweighted any loss business to my competition.

Tried the same thing during the slow months of 04 (just ending in early Jan 05), and what a differnce.

Traffic was the same between the two years, but sales were down a good 70%, making a periold of dismal sales even more dismal. I took the adsense off a week back and sales returned to normal.

I can't explain with everything else being equal, why consumers would abandon an ecomerce site with adsense in 2004, but not a year earlier.

Are consumers beginning to associate adsense as spam, and don't trust sites that serve up adsense ads anymore?

[creepychris]

Unfortunately, something like that may be happening. I love adsense from the point of view of a publisher. Adsense is great. And I believe I represent a genuine content site with quality content (don't we all!). But as a surfer I have run across it on one-too-many scraped garbage sites. It seems whenever I want to find something and I have to search, I usually come across a few sites with absolute garbage and those sites are running Adsense.

Google needs some quality control or it will permantly wreck its own image. I'm reminded of seizure-inducing flashing banners --anything to get that extra click --which condition people to avoid looking.

[europeforvisitors]

Are consumers beginning to associate adsense as spam, and don't trust sites that serve up adsense ads anymore?

That probably depends on the topic, the nature of the site, and what kinds of ads (and how many ad units) are being displayed. Certainly the problem of "ad blindness" or "AdSense skepticism" isn't universal, to judge from recent reports on this forum and my own AdSense statistics.

[lgn1]

It used to be, my adsense ads pointed to competitors that sold products I didn't sell, so it was win-win.

Before I killed the adsense, three of the ads were ebay affilates selling junk. I know Google is fixing this problem, but it looks like the damage has been done to Googles credibility on Adsense.

[creepychris]

EFV,

I also have a healthy CTR that has remained steady from the beginning, which refutes 'banner blindness'. What I think is interesting about what he is reporting is that having Adsense ads on his site has decreased his ability to sell his own things. Trust is a huge factor in making sales online. So the speculation is that having adsense somehow makes people suspicious of a site, which makes it harder for them to turn over their credit card numbers.

Across my sites, I don't sell anything. They are all pure content. So it is not really an issue. People expect ads from content sites, and besides, I'm not asking for their credit card numbers.

[ken_b]

That probably depends on the topic, the nature of the site, ...

And the audience.

I have issues with a certain big auction site, but my readers very often are big users of that auction site.

To many of them all those auction site ads might be a positive.

[contentsiteguy]

Maybe people are beginning to associate Adsense with a place to BUY things and that's why your ecommerce sales went down. My what a novel concept. :-)

Like you said, in 2003 none of your competitors were showing up in the Adsense ads so your sales didn't suffer. Now that it's been around a while many of your competitors likely found out how to use Adsense to promote their products and so you are giving all your customers to them. That's why most ecommerce sites don't display Adsense ads.

[lgn1]

I had competitors in 2003, as well as 2004, however my adsense competitors were selling related products, and were not a direct threat. The problem, I think now is that the customer clicks on an adsense ad, only to find themselves sucked into ebay, by an ebay affilate playing bait and switch.

If a customer clicks on an ad, and finds complementary products, they are gratefull. If they feel they have been suckered, its going to cause a credibility issue.

[Never_again]

Are consumers beginning to associate adsense as spam, and don't trust sites that serve up adsense ads anymore?

Maybe, but we certainly are not seeing, hearing, or reading that this is the case.

We have been running AdSense since June 2003 and continue to enjoy an extremely good reputation as “the” trusted source in our industry. We have had absolutely no negative user feedback. Our unique visitors and page views continue to increase (2004 up 28% over 2003) and AdSense revenue hit a record in December.

Granted, result vary greatly from site to site, so you could be in a product niche where a credibility issue exists. Have you thought about polling some of your users to see how they reacted to AdSense?

BTW, Google is working on the junk affiliate problem. See [webmasterworld.com...]

[Harry]

<snip>

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 1:21 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2005]
[edit reason] no solicitations please [/edit]

[Harry]

Here's the scoop.

It's possible to have both Adsense and sell products. Just don't post the ads where you sell products.

In my specific case, I also avoid putting Adsense on corporate pages too. I just add them to feature articles' pages. The people who go to each set of page have different needs anyway.