It’s a tough economy – an economy where every extra dollar helps grow your business, and where leaving any money on the table can hurt your long term success. You’re business that presumably offers a product or service, and every dollar you make through your website helps make sure that your business stays successful.
So when you build a website that is generating thousands of hits, it’s common to want to make a bit more money from them, especially if they’re not turning into sales. One of the ways that some companies do this is by adding advertisements, usually (although not always) in the form of Google Ads.
This isn’t the best idea.
Now, it’s not a terrible idea. It’s just not the best idea. The problems are as follows:
- Some advertisements are bound to be for companies that compete with your business.
- Advertisements make your site busier, and it takes their mind off of what you offer.
- Most ads have a tendency to make sites look unprofessional.
In many cases, placing advertisements on your business’s website will cause you to lose more business than it gains from the advertising.
Now, are there situations that adding advertisements makes sense? Possibly. If you have developed an informational website to support your main business, with hundreds of pages and potentially thousands upon thousands of hits, then advertisements could net you a pretty penny and be kept off of your homepage and main product pages. Then you’re making a bit of extra money off of the information without affecting your main site. Also, if the value per click is shown to be profoundly profitable, indicating that the money you make from your advertising can genuinely benefit your business – more than just another $20 a month – then it may be worth considering.
But it should be noted that with most advertising, the most you’re going to make through just advertising is between $40 to $100 a month, and that is when you are generating a couple thousand hits a day. For most business, that’s simply not enough revenue to justify turning your page into something unprofessional and potentially turning off new business.