Ad Bombardment

Quick, find an advertisement on this site. Oh wait you can’t, because there is none to be found. The value of my services far out weighs any money I could make from a banner on this site. Banners are a distraction from content, and text ads are designed in intent to deceive a visitor as content. Ooh, you made 5 cents from a one in a hundred visitors for that click. Was it worth it? If it happens sixty more times you might be able to buy one gallon of gas.

Too often I find blogs littered with Google ads. They push the content down, sideways, and all over the place. Content plays second because ad location is key. If you read any webmaster forum you can always find posts about “How do I get more hits?”. They want the traffic so they can make more with their ads. With little effort you can get a site that has 100 visitors a day. The problem though, is out of those 100 visitors most of them do not come back. The sites purpose is lost by “Ad Bombardment”, and the visitor experience is identified as “Annoyed”.

After attacking a visitor with ads, I can only assume the visitor will most likely never talk about the site, let alone bookmarking it. They are busy bookmarking the site they just went to using your ad, not your site. Are you getting better than 15% in return visitors over a course of a month? Imagine if you got 25%. Lets use the theory that  your marketing generates 1,000 new visitors a month. The difference between 15% and 25% is nearly double in the course of a year, and that is assuming those returning visitors are not helping your marketing efforts. My traffic x 2, I like that, who wouldn’t. Looking at the numbers for this ad free site, 39% of my visitors are return visitors. Yes, my numbers are growing, and so is my work load.

It’s o.k. to use ads to generate revenue, just be more careful in placement, and try not to get greedy. Ad Bombardment can kill a site.