ad-non-sense?

Ok guys, once again I am in the position of having to provide a case for something that seems like a no brain-er to me. I would like to put AdSense on our site. My boss doesn't want to. His reasoning is that we want to keep people on our site rather than directing them off to someone else's. Also he thinks having ads on our pages would detract from our credibility. I have tried getting him to sell some advertising space on our site as well (since we have a high dollar product and there is quite a bit of money in our traffic... not the point) anyway he hasnt gone for the ad space either. Can you guys think of anything that I should do in order to pacify some of his fears? I told him that the ads can be tastefully done and most people would not look down upon having these ads on our pages, in fact some would look at it as beneficial. I also told him we could filter out our competitors but he doesnt seem convinced. Is there anything I have missed that I might be able to use in defense of my case? This may just be something that I have to give up on but it seems like nonsense to me.

Hmm, I have to agree with your boss here. Ads make pages look less credible and do detract visitors from your site. I would never put ads on my business site (except if my business was a newspaper or something like that).

really? our site is more of an information site than a business site though. I mean we have one single product and one page that is our sales pitch. After that its all just info to help out our users etc. I mean I have seen adsense that is out of control but one bar of it somewhere would not seem tacky by any means to me. Am I in the minority? I told my boss that I think a detailed month long test would be the only way to determine how it would affect our site. We use Urchin stats so we ought to be able to tell if the ads have much of an affect either way. I still dont think I will be given the green light though. What do the rest of you guys think?

Stay away from the adsense for a site like that IMO.
If sales go down they will complain at you and say its the adsense.

skitzz are you kidding!?

don't put ads on your page - i have to agree with mick/everyone else here.

you DON'T want customers being driven away from the page... period. even if the ads are 'tastefully' positioned it will still make it look less valuable.

it's one thing if it's just a resource/content site, but if you have a product that you want to sell i definitely would think this is a bad move... makes your company appear as if you can't sell your product & have to display ads to supplement the revenue.

if its your personal site, that's a different story.

PS. nice title of the thread

Alright guys... you've convinced me... I guess the boss was right on this one. Would advertising such as banners etc fall along the same lines? We are adding forums etc so we will have a lot of space to put stuff... I guess I might just be trying hard to monetize the site.

i would think any sort of advertising (banners included) would fall into the same category... it just doesn't look professional.

on a seperate note, maybe you could create a seperate area (like a subfolder / subdomain) that is strictly for adsense and advertising. maybe something like an industry blog, current articles or product reviews....

as you already know though - the trick to adsense is TRAFFIC, not high paying keywords and sometimes not even quality content.... TRAFFIC makes adsense work (and advertising in general for that matter) ... id' say if you can get over 1000 uniques a day to a specific 'content' area of the site, then maybe (and just maybe) it would be worth a whirl...

Eh i think probably rather than that, my time would be better spent trying to figure out ways to convert more of the traffic we do get. If only the powers that be weren't so stubbornly stuck on some aspects of the site that I would bet my paycheck are killing our conversions (such as an automatic voice over when you land on our home page...aaaaargh I hate that thing). Thanks for the ideas though TG.

sure thing skitzz...

i agree that any time a web page talks to me it gets really annoying.

also, a KICKASS design can play a HUGE role when it comes to conversions.... if it looks legit a sense of trust is built. i think most surfers these days have at least some idea of what a wesite 'should' look like... when something doesn't meet their expectations, they are 'secretly' disappointed.... i wish i had some rock hard evidence to prove this based on conversion rates, but for now it's just a hunch.

I think your solution is easy....

IF you are going to make sales with your site and generate revenue through that fashion, then you need to have a kick-*** conversion rate. I would focus on that. However, if people are just Shopping or not even really ready to buy, then I would rather have them generate some small amt. of revenue, than none at all.

If a visitor is going to just leave your site, you may as well make some money when they do it. Plain and Simple.

Any suggestions on the design TG? I mean I know this isnt the site review section but since you mentioned it.

skitzz - give this free ebook a read... very short but pretty informative... i just read it a couple days ago...pretty interesting.

http://www.threadwatch.org/files/knockknock.pdf

<edit>i'm specifically referring to page 16 - the 'tell a story' section</edit>

Definetly I recommend you to not use AdSense on a business site.

You loose at least twice:
- once because you drive the visitors out of your site
- and once again before sites with adsense, and generally with big banners or so looks less serious/important/etc.

Better try to spend your time increasing the conversion ration ;)

i wonder how many posts / rep i could get if i just copied what other people said and posted it again.