Get Satisfaction, which we recently said was a great place to monitor your customers’ concerns and speak to them directly, has added Google AdSense ads to their site. But most of the site’s users won’t see them.
“We’re going to aim at keeping [ads] in one place on Get Satisfaction: in the spaces where active customers and companies won’t see them,” says Eric Suesz on the company’s blog.
That may be a terrible proposition to advertisers, but it sounds great for users, and it’s actually an extremely smart roll out for the company that should make them more money — but not from ads. Let me explain.
Here’s how Get Satisfaction’s ad integration works: All guests and non-logged in users will see AdSense ads on the site, while all logged in users won’t see the ads. Further — and here’s the really brilliant part — any company that signs up for one of the premium accounts that the company announced earlier this week will have ads removed for all users, including guests.
Because competitors often bid on keywords related to your product or services, restricting AdSense from those pages should be a major motivating factor toward signing up for a premium account for many companies. No one wants their competitors advertising on a page where customers are getting together to vent about issues they’re having with your product or service. My guess is that Get Satisfaction doesn’t expect to make much more than peanuts from these ads, but hopes that their presence will be an excellent sales tool for their new premium services.
Adding advertising to an existing service isn’t easy. When your users are used to getting everything for free, suddenly asking them to look at advertising or pay doesn’t always go over well. Get Satisfaction did both this week, and they did it in a way that makes a lot of sense, should keep users happy, and will likely help them sell premium accounts.
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That is a brilliant idea! Get Satisfaction made a great marketing decision by placing those ads.
November 8th, 2008 at 10:03 am
It’s funny… In this ad-free “web 2.0″ world people are like… “Wow! Great idea!” when a company puts ads on their website to start making money. It used to be called common sense and business as usual.
November 8th, 2008 at 10:52 am
@Czaries: You are right, putting ads on a site is usually considered common sense. I just thought that they implemented them really well.
November 8th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
GS is o.k., but I already find it cluttered and confusing. Slapping ads all over it is going to make it worse. Plus, I think it makes it look cheap.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Wow this is a great revenue model! I may be using something like it in a future web service.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
this is common sense. nothing great about it
November 10th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Common sense is putting ads up. Not common is the idea of having businesses pay to have their profiles be clear of ads — even for guests. It’s a bit of user-experience blackmail that I suspect will become common over the next year. A great idea!
November 11th, 2008 at 8:16 am