Should you consider using Google Adsense on your mortgage broker website?

oppenheimer · #1 (**permalink**) 01-13-2005, 05:44 PM

I am sure everyone has seen Google Adsense Ads on many a website, ok if you haven't just look above. You may ask yourself why would a mortgage website want to put ads on their website that may potentially take prospective mortgage borowers off their website and risk losing a client to another broker?

Let's consider the conversion rate of a given website, for the sake of discussion let's say mymortgagewebsite.com converts on average 5% per day (5 contacts - telephone calls, contact forms, applications or emails - for every 100 visitors), what happened to the other 95%? They left mymortgagewebsite.com! Maybe they had completed their mortgage search for the day. Maybe they used the back button on their browser and continued to evaluate competitors' websites offers. Perhaps when their comparison is complete they will return. Perhaps not. So on any given day 95 out of 100 visitors won't contact me and perhaps won't contact anyone, simply put their just shopping.

Ok. No problem. They left. No busssiness today! But I still don't want to risk having them leave my website and potentially doing their business eslewere. The fact of the matter is that you have probably less than 10-30 seconds to attract a potential borrower when they land on your website and try to prevent them from clicking back. Your website must be attractive and professional looking to them!

Next maybe you have 1 minute to convice them, with your home page text, that your the best mortgage broker for them. Cut to the chase on your home page or they'll be gone (back to search engine that sent them to your website).

Some may be searching for an answer to a specific question and therefore may browse your menu and perhaps click through some of your pages looking for the answer.

However, most won't be ready to contact you (or anyone) today - and they won't be staying on your website waiting to be ready. They'll leave and without Google Adsense or some type of banner adds they will go straight back to the search engine from which they arrived. Even with ads of some sort the greater percentage will go directly back and continue their search anyway. If they're leaving anyway, why not allow them to leave a tip as they exit via an ad or banner? If your website has done its job they will remember you and when ready to start the mortgage process they'll be back.

Frankly the click through rate on these ads is low, 1-3%. We use them on all of our sites, client sites as well as our website design sites. On client sites we don't place ads on the home page or any of the contact pages, on our own sites there even on the the home page! Remember that anyone landing on your website found you through the search engines and it is simple for them to click the back button on their browser and continue their search, so in my opinion fear that they find a better solution to their needs through ads on your site is not warranted.

A side benefit that is not readily apparent is the information the Adsense ads can give about how your web pages are interpreted by Google. In a competative market there are a lot of very keyword specific ads that can help tell you if your search engine optimization (SEO) is working (targeting your pages for the specific search terms important to your mortgage business). For example on your mortgage credit report page if the ads aren't for credit reporting companies - your page is probably not optimized as well as it could be. We have found this on our own sites. Considering the frequent additions and updates of the many pages they can be steered of target, one look at the ads and we have a good indication if we strayed to far away from our target subject and desired keyword relevance.

A question for you, in order for Google to display Ads on your mortgage website they have to know what every page is about in order to display keyword relevant ads. Do you think this has any ramifications as far as the depth and frequency of their spidering of your pages? More frequent, deeper spidering equals better listings in the search engine results!