Sure, SEO, Social Media Optimization and Paid Search Marketing can drive hordes of highly targeted traffic to your web site.
But is your site’s structure, lack of usability and negative user experience blocking conversions and sales?
ConvertUp (a very clean site) has posted their 11 Quick and Dirty Ways to Increase Conversions
One recommendation, which is completely obvious but still practiced by many small market merchants, is to remove ads from sites or pages which are set up to sell a product:
If you’re trying to get people to buy a product or a service and you’re running Adsense or another ad system on your site you may be making a big mistake. These ads provide exit points for your traffic (and potential customers). Keep your customers focused on the task at hand. If they leave the site through an ad, “Great you made $.25,” but just don’t assume that person will hit the back button or ever return to your site. You may have just lost yourself a sale.
Not to mention, ads look extremely unprofessional on e-commerce sites. They are fine for blogs with no other means of monetization, but if you’re selling something do yourself a favor and leave the ads off.
Sup Loren! What is this website all about?
One other good reason to remove ads is improving response time. All data that is displayed is uploaded twice, ones to your advertiser server (Google?) and ones to you customer.
If you have limitations in your uplink, you’re maybe double your render time of the page that is including ads.
Sweet!!! Loren you are seriously providing some great content!!! Thanks!!
If you are making money off of ads as well as selling a product it may not necessarily be the wisest thing to do to remove ads.
With one of my clients he decided that he would rather make $0.25 on a customer who is leaving vs. nothing at all. So we added ads to the product pages and ad money started to trickle in while conversions remained consistent.
This probably has a lot to do with the type of product being sold, and the targeting of your traffic – but it would be worth a test vs. just pulling ads.
I agree with Raffi. You can have a mix of both ads and sales, but you have to know how to do it.
I took the ads off one site and lost a lot of affiliate revenue. However, the conversions definitely increased. We also began accepting American Express credit cards and saw an impact there too.