Selling products AND using Adsense. OK? or bad idea?

Hi,
I am new to this site and new to this field.
I am learning a lot from reading everyones posts. Thanks.

I started a website a couple months ago. I sell Chinese herbal formulas. I also use Google Adsense on it. Some people tell me not to use Adsense because it will take away potential sales when they click on it and leave my site. My theory is that if the norm is that 2-5% of visitors turn into sales, then 95% of visitors leave your site with nothing, so I may as well give them an exit through Adsense and make some money out of it.
Any thoughts from anyone? Good idea to use both Adsense and sell products or just 1 of them.
Thanks a lot.

 

You might higher the chance of losing a sale via Adsense. I would tend to believe its a very bad idea.

 

Why don't you conduct an experiment? Since you are already running adsense, keep running it for the rest of the month, and then take it off your site for a month, and compare profit. Be sure to also measure traffic, so you can be more sure that the two months are comparable.

 

It could work well if you are careful about the placement of the adsense. If you can put them somewhere that people are only likely to click them when leaving the page anyway, you may be able to get some extra income without losing many sales.

The experiment is probably the best idea, but make sure you keep track of things as a percentage of the amount of traffic you have, so you get a fair compairison like Mike said.

 

I've done some testing and have found that AdSense does not affect overall conversions. You have 8 seconds to motivate an average user to buy when they land on your landing page. If they end up clicking on an AdSense link, that's because you already lost their interest. I've averaged about $100/day in adsense from this strategy and my conversion rate has stayed the same as it was the previous year.

 

Adsense should do no harm..if the buyer finds value on your site s/he will anyway buy your product. It is only when your offering is not attractive enough that the buyer will click on adsense link..and even then you will get some for the click. Have your cake and eat it too

 

I am one for saying adsense on shop selling real products is a very bad idea and to me makes no business. Firstly as you are giving you competitors filtered targeted traffic you might as well stick a big banner on the front of your website free of charge for them. Secondly customers often like to compare prices if they can. So they see your google adverts and off they go and see if they can get it cheaper and once your potential customer has clicked and left your site in general he/she is gone.

The idea of having your cake and eating it seems fine idea on the surface but if you were looking after my site and tell me we are make $100 a day from adsense I would probably fire you. Now I am making an assumption here but if getting $0.25 per click that is 400 potential customers which I am giving to potential competitors. Now even if 350 of those came to my site by accident which would not be true it leaves 50. If out of those 50 only 10 would have bought something at a minimum of $15 clear gross profit it would still give me $150 and a potential customer who may return. Makes a far better idea to find out why you customers are leaving and fixing it then sticking adsense on your site. I mean if all these customers are leaving I would be asking if I am missing a product line,etc.

That's my 2 cents anyway.

 

Adsence CTR is around 1-5% for me, not big even all go out from my shop.

 

Never do it in my opinion. definitely a bad idea.
first: you lose respect as a company
second: you are helping your competitors to sell their goods using your traffic
third: you will lose sales from your ADs