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.
Josh CatoneBefore joining Jilt, Josh Catone was the Executive Director of Editorial Projects at Mashable, the Lead Writer at ReadWriteWeb, Lead Blogger at SitePoint, and the Community Evangelist at DandyID. On the side, Josh enjoys managing his blog The Fluffington Post.
