Monetizing Non-converting Traffic with Adsense

By Doug Bates
Posted Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Conventional wisdom holds that sites that exist for ecommerce or lead-generation purposes should not run advertising. Why would you want to send your hard-earned traffic elsewhere? Take that as a serious question and not a rhetorical one, and you may see cases where there are good reasons to send your traffic elsewhere - and get paid for doing so!

Successful search engine marketing casts a broad net. As with fishing, a broad net catches some junk fish. Smart fishermen figure out how to sell those fish, even though they're not the fish they're looking for.

The biggest clue that you may have an opportunity to earn revenue off of this junk traffic is in your customer correspondence. Are you repeatedly getting inquiries about things you don't offer? (Of course such inquiries may indicate you should expand your product offers, but that's a different way of looking at the question.) Another clue is that there are product lines that your competitors often carry but you don't. Or there's something related to your product that there's a demand for, but for whatever reasons it's not practical for you or your competitors to sell the product.

If any of the above are true, try adding a page on your site for the item you don't offer, explaining that you don't offer it, and display ads from the Google Adsense program.

If your site is in the business of selling things, rather than a site that earns its revenues from advertising, you may be unfamiliar with the Google Adsense program. If you're running Google AdWords ads for your site, you may be familiar with AdWords' Content Delivery option, where your AdWords ads run on non-search-engine sites. Using a system based on the same technology Google uses to determine what sites are most relevant for a search query, Google's Adsense system figures out what subjects a particular webpage is about and delivers ads that are most relevant to that subject. The cost per click that the AdWords advertiser pays is collected by Google and shared - pretty generously - with the website running the advertising.

As the site owner, you control where the Adsense ads will appear and how they will look. You don't have to have ads all over your site. You can have ads on just one or a few carefully chosen pages - which is what we're talking about here.

Guess what people do when they're searching for something you don't sell and they come to a page saying you don't sell it? They click away from your site. Why not give them some ads to click on? When testing this, we've seen amazingly high clickthrough rates - over 40% in some cases. With Adsense ads, that's cash straight to your bottom line, from traffic that wasn't going to buy from you anyway.

In addition, we have seen a dramatic reduction in requests for products that aren't offered. Eliminating these inquiries reduces your spending on customer service, which means more money to your bottom line.

"But what if those ads running on my site advertise my competitors?" you might ask. This is not a problem. With the Adsense program you can specify any domain name whose ads you don't want running on your site, and eliminate them.

Getting ads that are relevant for a product you don't offer increases clickthroughs, which increases your revenues. Google Adsense evaluates a webpage similarly to how the Google search engine does to determine whether the page is appropriate for a particular search. As with search engine optimization, while you cannot control what Google does, you can influence it.

First, do a few searches on Google to determine whether there are specific ads you'd like to have appear on the webpage for the product you don't offer. For example, if you don't sell underwater widgets, search Google for "underwater widgets" to see if there are AdWords ads for sites that do. If there are, you're in luck. Having these particular ads run on your webpage will mean sky-high clickthroughs.

Next, if you know how to write a search engine optimized webpage, you already know how to write the page that will optimize delivery of Adsense ads. It's really the same thing. Optimize the page concentrating on the key phrases that are most likely to trigger the ads you'd like to see running on that webpage. If the ads aren't relevant enough, you can keep tweaking the text until you get the right ads to run. Getting the right ads to run can dramatically increase your clickthroughs and revenues.

One last thing that's also nice about this is that not only are you doing something good for yourself, you're also doing something good for your visitor because you're helping direct them to a site that may better meet their needs.

Doug Bates Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting

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