Many clients ask me if they should place advertising on their site to monetize it, and because it is so easy to add Google Adsense, many people think they should go ahead and just do it.

I would strongly discourage the addition of advertising to any corporate site. While you may need to monetize a magazine or community service type website, I believe that you should never place ads on a corporate site for two reasons.

1. You lose your viewers to your direct competitors. Imagine, going to a sales meeting and handing out your competitor’s business card at the end of the meeting. You would never do that in real life, do not do it on your website. If you understand how Google works, you’ll understand that they are good at what they do and if you write a page about a niche subject that your business provides, Google will place ads on that page with competitors that match your keywords.

2. You do not make enough money to justify the loss of customers. Google Ads can make you money, but not as much as you think. I make about $5.00 per 1000 page views on some of our websites, so it is fairly meager. I would guess that our average corporate client may get 2500 to 5000 page views a month, so you would make about $15 to $30. Would you sell your leads and customers to your competitor for that much?