No, I don’t mean it that way. Of course you should advertise!
What I mean is, if your economic engine is driven by product sales, customer acquisition, and the like, then what are you doing on your website distracting users with ads?
Unless your business is advertising-driven, it’s almost always a bad idea to entice users to click away from your site so they can go buy something from… I dunno, say… your competitors. The revenue you make from that visitor is a penny or two. The lifetime value of a customer, I hope, is much higher.
And yet you see these kinds of muddled models all the time.
Merely strange is the etailer or B2B supplier who also shows low-rent AdSense ads.
Stranger still, unless you can somehow explain it to me, is someone who shows a custom banner in something like their shopping cart checkout process, allowing the user to consider buying from some other company. It would be like a car salesman handing out flyers for the Lincoln Navigator as his prospect walked from the test drive over to the desk to sign paperwork to lease an Acura RDX.
If she was buying a Ford Flex, I’d almost understand. Same company as Lincoln, higher margins on the Lincoln. Then again, they’re about to sign the paperwork. Do you really want to interfere with that?