When I do my Basic Usability and Design Analysis, there are two particular items I check for. Does the site stay on topic, and if it has  advertisements, do the advertisements interfere with the visitors use of the site.

Here is a good example of staying on topic. The site File-O-Scope does two things really well on this site. They skipped trying to make money from advertisements, and they kept the site on topic. They want to sell  LAN file search software and not ad clicks. Ads are distractions, and if you use enough of them, they could start working against you.

The Numbers Against Ads

Imagine the File-O-Scope site with just a couple of Google text ads running. Now imagine it gets 1,000 visitors a day. If ten a day click on those ads, generating say, $0.20 a click, they could make a whopping $2 a day. Over a month that is $60. That $60 also just cost 300 visitors from buying their product. If their marketing guys have been doing a good job, and sending them a quality target audience they should be getting at least 1% of their visitors to make a purchase. 1% of 300 is 3 sales. Their product is $39.95, and that times those three new sales is  $119.85. No ads, double their money.

You could argue that you could make more than $0.20 a click, but I could also argue that I did not count the cost to get those visitors to the site. I could also argue that because the site has less distractions without the ads, the sales increased for the group of visitors that did not buy or did not click on an ad. More people were likely to buy. If total sales increased by just 0.5% from overall traffic, that could be five more sales. Revenue from ads on a site like this just don’t add up enough to make sense.

A Signature of Slop

When I see excessive ads on a site, it’s an automatic signature to me that site owner is either desparate, making some serious money, or does not really see the purpose of their own site. Usually it not the case of  the first two, but a signature of slop. The sites main idea has been lost, or was never fully developed to begin with. These sites are typically full of distractions, or what I like to think of as “good ideas that don’t belong”, and ads, ads, ads. Why isn’t my site making enough money they think, or I just haven’t sold enough ads. Sorry, that’s not the problem. The problem is their distraction.

Good ideas can also be just as damaging. I have a good idea, I will add another widget to my site. Yikes, don’t do it! Here is a little hint on how to focus your site, and get visitors loving it. The Hint: “One of the greatest inventions for the computer is the delete button.” Don’t go deleting the site though, just the distractions!