Contemplating Adsense / Struggling with the Notion

[Brotherhood of the Bean]

I find myself constantly struggling with the thought of whether to incorporate adsense or not. One one hand I think, why not. On another I think, I am paying for a hosted site to avoid ads.

I was just wondering if other people who have coffee sites have, or are struggling with this topic.

 

[ValueClique]

One way of looking at it is this: If the prospective customer is interested in the offers that you present on your site, then they are a prospective customer and you have nothing to worry about. If the prospective customer is not interested in the offers on your site, then they are not a prospective customer after all, and you may as well give yourself a crack at getting paid for the exit traffic if they are going to leave your site anyway.

 

[ourcoffeebarn]

I just deleted the adsense from my "Google Box" on my site. Now I just use the search box and the Firefox one too. It didn't generate enough money to make it worth losing a sale to a growing "niche" of online sales. I saw way to many ads offering sales way below the MAP on the high end sales. I don't worry about my coffee, that speaks for itself!

 

[blackjava]

I have been using adsense for a few years now. There are people who claim
that if you are selling a product you shouldn't use it. However, I don't think
that is necesarily so.
I think that if some one comes to your site and like what they see they will buy.
If they are just browsing they may click thru the google links. It may not be a
huge income but it all helps. And it costs nothing. Do some research on
placement of ads. It can make a big difference.

 

[dealerpix]

I agree with backjava. I use adwords and adsense on my sites (not coffe sites though) and they work great, depending on how you use them. Of course, you don't want the ads on your checkout pages or anything, but if you have pages with a great deal of content, or just rich content, it could bring in some extra income. Of course, if your site looks cheap like it was built specifically for displaying adsense ads, you won't sell anything anyway. Just keep your ads small, like using the text links format, and make sure they are clearly ads so people don't click them thinking they are links on your own site.

 

[angelarey]

Hello,

The hardest thing that I had using adsense was people really weren't 'buying' from another site that I worked on. However, if you don't care about if they are buying and just want people to click on your site, there are other options out there.

For example, if you are trying to sell your coffee of the month club and the landing page (the page that the user enters your site) is about how to roast beans, then they are going to leave. It must be very very detailed. Adsense is purely computer lanuage, it won't assume anything. If the ad campaign is coffee of the month, then make sure the ad and the link all match up or people will leave. You also have to have a quality site or the keywords will cost a ton. You should not be paying more then 15 cents a click. I was using a keyword, but that keyword was NOWHERE in my page, so adsense wanted it to be $5.00 a click. If you improve the quality of that keyword, it needs to be in the content of your page, title, etc. and then the price per click will gone down.

I have stopped using adwords / overture, it was eating my budget alive (this was for a non coffee website that I was doing it for).

Best of luck,

 

[dealerpix]

Angela, you are right about using Adwords, if you use it wrong, you can totally shoot yourself in the foot. But adwords has a very different approach than Adsense.

 

[demetri]

Angela, you are right about using Adwords, if you use it wrong, you can totally shoot yourself in the foot. But adwords has a very different approach than Adsense.

Quite right dealerpix, adwords is quite different. adsense and adwords are ying and yang. I guess if you're looking at generating adwords traffic the key is to have a very large list of keywords and to only specifically target those.

I would run most of my adwords campaigns with about 10,000 keywords specifically targeted (no broad match) then I could get a lot of impressions bidding at around $0.05 a click.

Onto adsense though. If you're concerned about losing sales then you can always filter out the ads of your competitors, though with such a highly competitive niche it would be virtually impossible. This documentary I watched a couple of weeks back claimed that coffee was the second most valuable commodity next to oil. That makes it one highly competitive niche.

Factor in all the different approaches to preparation of a cup of coffee and you have an insane amount of potential ads.

On our commerce sites we ran adsense and found it a nice addition to revenue without hurting our sales too much. At least not in a noticeable way.

Brotherhood of the Bean I think you should give it a try, if you place your ads right it could be a very good addition to your web-site. Think of it this way, there are visitors to your website that you probably can't fulfill orders for. Adsense does a good job of matching surfers with advertisers that want to reach a specific locality.

Demetri