For some products, the margin is pretty low. And if you have a site with many visitors but low BTR (buy through rate :) why not making some easy extra money?

Essentially, those ads are there for the window shoopers. For many sites selling physical goods, there will be many more people who are surfing for price comparison, looking for reviews, or the like. Since those people are not going to buy anyway, you might as well have them leave via an ad that will make you some money.

There are all sorts of design implications, of course, surrounding making your own "BUY!" button more attractive than the ads, and as with anything, you need to track the results, do A/B testing, and so on. If you find that conversions are lower when the customers are shown ads, and the ad revenue doesn't compensate you adequately for lost sales, then remove the ads. If conversions are equal, you have a second revenue stream for no effort. And hey, miracles could happen, and conversion revenue could be higher!

It also depends on the product you're selling as well. My ecommerce site is so niche oriented I get requests from marketing students to do case studies for their classes. I installed AS on advice of a fellow webmaster when I told him how much traffic my site received. The earnings from AS effectively doubled my monthly revenues and sales of my product did not drop at all. You can filter out competitive sites' ads if you wish (although it is time consuming) and leave related topic ads to avoid a decrease in your sales.

Thanks for these posts guys - I guess I saw it as a way of putting a can of pepsi in a six pack of coke but you have enlightened me :)

As I've heard it before via ShoeMoney:

A sale is made on every visit. Either you sell them your product or they sell you by taking bandwidth (which in-turn in money "in a way).

PS - If Shoe reads this, he stole that from Boiler Room. One of my favorite movies!

Same here,
I have good SER 98% of my traffic can be considered organic - not advertising for my products but found that by inserting one Adsense leaderboard above the fold and link unit in the navigation would nicely complement my sales.

My competitive add filter is empty and I don't get MFA sites. ECPM often overshoots $20 and occasionally crosses $30.

I use 10% of adsense revenue for my adword campaign.

Adding adsense has affected my revenu positively and has provided me with leeway to diversify my lineup.

Added bonus - since my content are my products, I get that little extra incentive to add products which are not considered very lucrative. This has made possible to spend time putting products online which have been sitting on the shelf and previously not considered to be worthy adding to my ecommerce store.

If the visitor was just window shopping anyway, better have them leave through adsense than the 'back' button.

It's also nice to make money withoug having to ship any item.

It also depends on the product you're selling as well.

Precisely, my sites are all about the international supply of my specialised construction products from countries such as Brazil, China, India, Italy and so forth.

I only sell by the full container loads to wholesalers or for project contracts yet my sites are all SERPs #1 or 2 for all the niche keywords for each product.

My sites allow retail suppliers etc the chance to advertise on the #1 site for those products at very reasonable rates and Joe Public buyer also gets an education about the actual product he is considering buying consequently he can also make a more informed choice when talking to dealers about his potential purchase.

It's a great pay-back. I promote my products to bulk buyers yet dealers can advertise off the back of my SEOing...I even have competitors targetting my sites with ads:-)

When I see Adsense on an ecommerce site I think fly-by-night operation with a shoe string budget. You'll get neither sale nor click from me...

If your ecommerce site can't survive selling its products then you need to try a different business. I won't buy from someone who's business is barely surving.

Motorhaven wrote: When I see Adsense on an ecommerce site I think fly-by-night

What you think has absolutely no bearing when it comes to putting food on MY table.

The only revenue for my family of four is from my 4 ecomerce sites with adsense. I don't have a day job. This is IT. The adsense paid for the electric bill last month, one week of groceries and the phone -internet bill... all this while NOT affecting my sales negatively. I say keep it comming!

I have clients such as Sonoco, USDA, US Army, BP oil who thankfully disagree.

When I inserted adsense, I thought Man this looks spammy. I had 3 adblocks - too much for my kind of site so I scaled it back a bit.

motorhaven - You make an awful lot of assumptions with absolutely no facts whatsoever to base your claims.

Every site's motive for displaying advertisements of any type is completely different, to assume this:

I won't buy from someone who's business is barely surving.

is incredibly presumptuous and naive.

Essentially, those ads are there for the window shoopers. For many sites selling physical goods, there will be many more people who are surfing for price comparison, looking for reviews, or the like. Since those people are not going to buy anyway, you might as well have them leave via an ad that will make you some money.

Thanks gothwalk, your comment is really clear to me for GA inclusion into my site.

I'd suggest to separate your site in two sites:
- the real ecommerce psart wqhere yoou sell not hainv ads
- a SEO site that gets the #1 spot where you accept ads and (more so) advertise you own ecommerce site.

That way it does look lessen to look and reputation of your ecommerce site, and it allows for a deversification of your income.

My opinion when I see an Adsense sense block is entirely valid. It is my perception of the business. If you don't like that I don't care... I won't buy from you. The reality of your company to your clients and potential clients means nothing because they may not see that. What they see and perceive is what counts.

But... who am I too know? 10 years running a very succesful Internet business with excess of a million monthly visitors.

Your may not think adsense is driving away some customers but how do you know?

As I said earlier... if you have to resort to adsense on an ecommerce site you might want to look at your business model. Its like walking into a convenience store that has every inch of space crammed with crap for sale verses some of the better run chains like QT. QT got where it is by not being chincy and small time.

I believe better time is spend increasing conversions, raising margin and increasing traffic.

I'll close on this: do you ask questions on this site to get honest feedback or to just hear a bunch of yes-men?

Motorhaven - not only do I entirely disagree with you - I also ask the question, since you are obviously so anti the use of Adsense on sites, why do you bother to read or input on the Adsense forum? As far as I am concerned there are a lot of very big sites out there - bigger than yours - who deem it acceptable, and obviously profitable - to place Adsense adverts on them. Xe - the currency site - I imagine is a pretty massive player, and they have no problem placing adverts on their pages. Nor, in my opinion, does this in any way detract from the professionalism of the site. Yes I agree, a site over-loaded with Adsense is not good, nor does it look professional, but perhaps one block of adsense adverts IMHO certainly does not make a site look unprofessional or spammy. More fool you if you refuse to use sites with Advertising on them.....

Your may not think adsense is driving away some customers but how do you know?

Insofar as my own businesses are concerned my products are sold out for months and months ahead and, unfortunately, having to refuse orders from potential new clients. I am actually in the planning stage for June 2007 running through to December 2007 to increase our production even further.

Showing AdSense on my sites actually assists retail and wholesale buyers alike providing information for Joe Public purchasers and allowing advertisers a competitively-priced, easy to administer and 100% relevant web site for their advertising focus.

It entirely depends on one's sector whether one deems AdSense suitable and profitable however until one has tried it and failed, don't decry those who have been successful.

MotorHaven wrote: I'll close on this: do you ask questions on this site to get honest feedback or to just hear a bunch of yes-men?

I'm not certain I understand your statement. I send a survey after every sale in my shipping notification. I have not received anything negative concerning Adsense.

I don't have the kind of traffic you have about 300 unique daily... enough to live on and enough credibility to makes daily sales.

I have developed several tools to increase my credibility - world map of client locations, customer testimonial displayed from the survey database and recently added a large ADD TO CART button. Streamlined my site (byte wise) and optimised the pictures for faster loading.

Also, because of your input, I have enable adsense to be displayed only for the first 5 page views of a visitor using PHP session and replaced it with a self promotion banner. It makes sense not to drive away visitors who are clearly interested in my product.

The code for this is extremely simple in PHP:
//----- every page of your store
session_start(); // start a session (not required if using a cooked commerce system
if(isset($_SESSION['views'])) $_SESSION['views'] = $_SESSION['views']+ 1;
else $_SESSION['views'] = 1;
//--------------------

Then when calling the adsense code
if($_SESSION['views'] > 4 ) include("bannerads.php"); // 4 or more page views invokes self promotion
else include("adsense_code.php"); // of lower than 5 page views show adsense code

The object for this code is:
If a visitor is in the wrong place, or is just surfing, I provide an adsense exit within 5 page views.
else If a visitor sees more than 5 pages, then it is most definately an interested visitor so I show that visitor banners promoting other products I have available using phpbanneradsnew.

Your objection to Adsense on ecommerce sites made me want to try alternatives - I can understand that spending resources to try to attract visitors to an ecommerce site and then encouraging them to leave through adsense may seem suicidal.

>>>I also ask the question, since you are obviously so anti the use of Adsense on sites, why do you bother to read or input on the Adsense forum? <<<

I did not say I was against Adsense on site, nor is there anything I said that makes that "obvious". I am against Adsense on ecommerce site. I am very much for Adsense on content sites. Having run both succesful content and ecommerce sites, its *my* opinion that Adsense sense fits well on one but cheapens the look of the other.

>>>As far as I am concerned there are a lot of very big sites out there - bigger than yours - who deem it acceptable, and obviously profitable - to place Adsense adverts on them. <<<

I was specifically speaking about Adsense on *ecommerce* sites as that is the subject of this thread, so please don't strike me down for something I did not say and also allow me my opinion.

WWW is full of professionals, mostly, and I hope there is no room for disagreement here.

I'll give you an example of my company increasing my income but making a big mistake doing so: blocking users who run ad blockers. I tried it, clicks when up, and some very loyal long-time users got upset. Even worse, is the users who leave and never tell you. They won't fill out surveys... they just quietly go away. I gotta take the long term view. The lone "nut" who disagrees with what we do often speaks for a silent but significant minority.

Now, there is one way I see that Adsense can work on an ecommerce site and that's on content specific pages on the site, so long as there's a clear distinction between the ecommerce section and others.

palain,

Glad your site is doing well.

I do tend to paint things black and white, and not having seen your site I'm open to saying there are exceptions. My advice is just be very careful about how you implement Adsense on ecommerce sites.

My apologies Motorhaven - mis-read, and mis-interpreted your post. No offence intended, and yes I can now see your point. :)