An effective pairing of AdSense and e-commerce

Imineo.com is a French video-on-demand site offering a wide variety of videos in different formats. In 2005, the site's owners decided to use Google AdWords to drive qualified traffic to their site. After setting up their first campaigns, they implemented conversion tracking to evaluate their overall return on investment. More recently, the company added AdSense to their site. As co-owner Jean-Baptiste Sers told us, "Our business model is not based on advertising revenue -- but in order to increase our AdWords spend, we wanted to use AdSense."

For an e-commerce advertiser, this might seem risky. Some might think that integrating AdSense could have resulted in a sales drop because of users clicking on the ads instead of buying one of the videos. But as Imineo team implemented AdSense, they noticed that qualified visitors came to the site with the intention to buy the videos and did not click on the sponsored links, while other visitors usually clicked on one of the relevant ads.

Imineo's strategy highlights how e-commerce sites can use AdSense to monetize traffic that usually exits the site using the URL address bar. Overall, the use of AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Jean-Baptiste put it, "AdSense has helped us monetize the visits of these other visitors and therefore increase the overall revenue/client ratio."

If you own an e-commerce site, here are a couple of suggestions.

• Try testing AdSense first on your exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your sales.
  
  
• If, like Imineo, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not affect your conversions, we encourage you to increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. The additional revenue coming from AdSense can help you generate more qualified traffic and therefore increase your overall sales.
  

Posted by Etienne Jambou - AdSense Optimization Team