What Your Company Should Know About Google Adsense
4 minutes | Word Count: 604Google Adsense is arguably the most popular form of website monetization available. Everyone, from individual bloggers to business owners, is utilizing Google Adsense to profit from the traffic that a site receives. Simply activate Google Adsense and enjoy the revenue that you will collect every time someone clicks an ad. This serves as a low-maintenance method for converting your hard-earned web traffic to a source of income.
While the advantages of having these ads on your company’s site or blog are apparent, there are also some negative effects. Below is a discussion of the impact utilizing Google Adsense will have on your business.
Brand Value
One downside of using Google Adsense is the possibility that it will take away from the level of respect that people have for your brand. Generally speaking, people don’t appreciate advertisements. Allowing for ads on your website may cause people to have a negative experience and might leave a bad taste in their mouths if they realize that you are profiting from the ads.
While a professional looking website will encourage admiration, a site full of tacky advertisements can greatly harm the reputation of your brand. Before you make the decision to activate Google Adsense on your site, you need to decide whether the few cents you make for every click is worth the risk.
Competition
Another negative possibility that Adsense opens the door for is the appearance of competitor’s advertisements on your website. Considering that Adsense uses a contextual-based system to select the ads that appear on a site, every ad will be related to a site’s content.
For example, a website featuring construction equipment might end up with accompanying ads highlighting empire bulldozers. While it’s great that the ads are relevant to your site, it is counterproductive if they are promoting a competitor’s product. Inadvertently leading customers to your competitors’ websites is a very real downside to implementing Google Adsense.
Lost Traffic
One of the main goals in most web marketing campaigns is to drive traffic to a website. Companies do everything they can to leverage their digital assets in order to get people to visit their site and see their products.
The ads that this monetization program produces often serve as a direct deterrent to the goal of encouraging web traffic. Rather than giving visitors the chance to peruse your site and to become a customer, these advertisements encourage potential customers to move on to another site. Not only can this create an obstacle for web sales, it will also increase bounce rates for your site’s analytics.
Advantage
The previous points make it apparent that Google Adsense is not a loss-less system for making a profit. All negative implications aside, Adsense is still a viable means for bloggers and business owners to supplement their income. Websites are costly to build and run and any method that helps to offset these expenses is likely a welcomed addition.
If you choose to seek these profits and implement Google Adsense then you must do so in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the integrity of your company’s web efforts. This means building a strong site with good content before you cover it with distracting ads. Also, building a sound reputation prior to using the program will reduce their negative impact.
While Google Adsense can be a fairly simple way to earn additional income for your business, this benefit does not come without consequences. Consider the aforementioned implications of using Google Adsense before you choose to activate the program on your company website.