Should You Put Google Ads On Your Ecommerce Site?

One of the biggest debates in the ecommerce world is whether to post PayPerClick advertisements on a website, or not. Many sites are using video advertisements to improve the look and feel of their sites. Others are hoping that PayPerClick will offer a passive source of income, but this short-term thinking may cost the company serious profits.

The purpose of a PayPerClick ad is to take a visitor from your website and put them on another website. This person leaves before they ever see the host company’s squeeze page, buy-now page, or Social Networking tools. This means that a potential customer is gone for good. The problem is - the ads on the host company’s website represent the competition.

PayPerClick Passive Income

On one side of the debate is the idea that PayPerClick lets ecommerce businesses generate some revenue from people who were going to leave the website anyway. The problem arises when the website looks at the actual numbers.

It takes several months before Google starts registering clicks, even if thousands of people have already clicked the link. Even when Google does start registering links, they rarely register more than one half of the actual links. In many cases, Google counts less than half.

Then, there is the Page Rank Trap. Google only pays a percentage of the money promised, based on the site’s page rank. A site can build more than 10 000 inbound links and 1000 pages of content and still have only Page Rank 3, earning about .05% of Google’s promised payout. Many sites (non MFA - Made For Adsense) work for 2 - 3 years before they earn $100 a month.

A website can make hundreds of dollars a month from Adsense, as long as the primary purpose of the site is to generate PayPerClick traffic.

PayPerClick Traffic

Many ecommerce businesses sign up for a PayPerClick program through Yahoo or Google to generate traffic. While the search engine advertising companies promise that they do not favor their advertisers, it is foolish not to. They are only cutting their throats letting sites which do not use their ads to rank higher than the sites who do use their ads.

From this side of the fence, PayPerClick is a good deal, because you are the company stealing customers from the competition. However, very few PayPerClick programs give the advertiser control over sites they appear on.

Google does, to a certain extent. It is possible to visit a major competitor’s site, which generates millions more hits than your site does, and place an ad on their pages. However, this does not guarantee that these same people will not click off your website.

Rule #1 of Sales
The first rule of sales is to hook a potential customer. This means keeping them on the host ecommerce site, and encouraging them to click through the links until they reach the buy now page.

There are some crafty ways to do this. For example, make the link bar to squeeze pages and buy-now pages look like PayPerClick ads. Another trick is to lead people from one website owned by the host company to another of their sites, in effect, creating a big circle.

However, make sure that the main pages are optimized with no=follow code in the links. Search engines penalize this type of ‘black hat’ SEO trick. The no=follow code in the ads will prevent the search engines from penalizing the site.

Both of these tricks will keep potential visitors inside the company’s ecommerce sites.

Another trick is to use a ‘default’ internal search tool. Instead of Google’s search, use one that defaults inside the ecommerce network’s sites, instead of on the world wide web.

Keeping customers is the only way to increase profits, and retain customers.