Actually loosing Revenue?

[paul]

Does anyone ever get the feeling that
1) making the ads so subtle that they blend into your site and
2) Sending visitors to potential competitors

in the long run can actually be lowering your revenue? Maybe you have nothing to sell (yet), but if you do introduce something to sell, or have other ads running at some CPM, you may actually be making less money than you should be if you let your customers find their way around your site first, get to know it, bookmark it and return every so often rather than visit a potential competitor because you make it so appealing to do so.

One solution i can think of woul be to only show ads to people who are members of your site.

Is this a concern of other adsense users?

[Joel Comm]

Interesting ideas you raise, Paul.

I know of some people that try to sell product on their site, who make more from the AdSense than retail profit. There are some sites where AdSense makes no sense for them, because it can distract from the purpose of the site. But even Buy.com has AdSense on many of their pages now. I guess they figure that if people aren't going to buy from them, at least they can leave some change in the tip jar on the way out!

As for member-based sites, I don't think Ads will show on pages that require a login. Someone correct me if I am wrong please.

Joel

[Bobette Kyle]

There are some sites where AdSense makes no sense for them Yes.

I think it's an individual decision...depending on the site content and goals for each page. I don't think it makes much sense at all for service provider looking for clients to put a lot of AdSense on the page.

I see your point about letting people visit awhile rather than encouraging them to leave right away, and I guess it could happen in some cases. From personal experience, that's not been the case...I've had AdSense on site since July, 2003. Both my site traffic and AS revenues have grown pretty much steadily and consistently over the two years.

Something I do on certain pages - if I really want the visitors to focus on a particular part of the content or take an action other than leaving by ads - is "deomptimize" or leave ads off of that page....test different configurations to get the desired overall mix of actions.