This is a question that is seldom heard yet seems to be very important prior to getting involved in a Google Adsense Campaign.

Ideal Google Adsense users:

• Forums
• Bloggers
• Networking Communities

Individuals that want to stay away from Google Adsense:

• ANYBODY that offers their OWN product or service

Reasoning:

First you must understand how Google Adsense works & its commitment to paid advertisers.

Commitment to the Paid Advertiser:

• Targeted Traffic with the highest intentions of self conversion

How Adsense Provides that service to the Paid advertiser:

• Using a mathematical algorithm Google is able to spider a websites content to find the most relevant keywords, Thus enabling Google to match similar Advertisements to produce the best targeted results for a matching paid advertiser.

What does this mean to you?:

• This means that if you sell "Power Tools" and you place Google Adsense on a page for "Power Drills" a relevant ad to Power Tools & or Power Drills will be placed on the Page in the Adsense block giving your potential & or existing customers the opportunity to buy from your competitor(s).

Forum / Blogger / Community Owners / Etc.:

• The above means little to you due to the fact that the majority of your services are free anyways. Google Adsense is Ideal in your cases to aid in generating some type of revenues to justify your sites maintenance / Hosting / & Domain charges.

Hope this Helps, Good Luck!

I'd agree with all of this, except for the second point in VERY isolated circumstances.

If you have a site that cannot generate any more profit/revenue for your product or service, then putting GAS on your site can actually be beneficial. One of my sites actually falls under this category.

Mind you, that's about 1 in 10,000 so I don't expect most people would be in that boat.

It works well for me, but I think it's the nature of my site. I do have one page I called "tools.html" - it's "health tools" technically but I just used tools ... well, you guessed it, I got ads for craftsman tools, etc., so I took the google ad off that page. The keywords, content, etc., wouldn't get rid of ads for actual, physical tools...

But on my web design site (which needs re-doing ... look out I'll be asking for input there! ) I have noticed too much competition showing ads so I've personally seen what you're referring to and it's a good point to make and consider. Trying to block all your competition gets to be a bit much and you can wind up with irrelvant ads, public service ads, or whatever ad you may have running in place of a Google ad so it sprt of defeats the purpose, doesn't it.

Trying to block all your competition gets to be a bit much and you can wind up with irrelvant ads, public service ads, or whatever ad you may have running in place of a Google ad so it sprt of defeats the purpose, doesn't it.

Not necessarily, For example:

Rather than using a random Google ad that spiders content for the most targeted spot aiding their advertising client. Maybe Place a relative Ad; Your in Website Design, However if you Don't offer Hosting find out if the host you use has a PPC/PPS program. (Myself I use Godaddy) Because I don't host I have a Godaddy ad on my site that generates an additional $250.00 a month (Not much No).

However the ad is still targeted in a complementing field enough to provide semi-targeted traffic to Godaddy (Additional revenues for me) & still not in direct competition with me (So to speak).

No. you can't block your potential consumers from buying from your competitors all the time, However I have found that cross linking your own products & services in order to increase retention rates on your site Rather than provide Exits (Links to other sites) tends to increase my Conversion rates (Which is what business is all about).

You figure the average potential consumer loses interest within the first 5-10 seconds of landing on a site (You can normally track this in your Statistics).

Myself, when I added more inner cross linking strategies I found that my sticky rate (Retention) increased from a 2.4 page view average to a 4.3 page view average (Almost Doubled).

So I suppose I'm a believer now. Test the theory yourself & track the results, then compare to your before report seeing that results vary for everyone. If it helps out, stick with it.