I recently heard of an interesting advertising company called exitjunction.

I liked the idea, as the advertising doesn’t take up space on my website.

The way it works is: someone finds your website via a search engine, they take a stickybeak, then decide to press the browser back button to look for something else. Instead of going back to the search engine, they get taken to an exitjunction.com advert page (that looks like search results).

At this point, you can either click on an ad, or you can click the back button once again, and end up back at the search engine.

Now, I did a bit of research, and I found some people saying it could interfere with google adsense. But nobody had any positive proof… it was all: “maybe”, “it shouldn’t”, “it might”.

OK, I’ll try it out.

I also decided to try out the new google youtube ads at the same time (I should know better by now: never do multiple changes, as you don’t know which one is causing the problem).

My adsense income is so low, that I figured that it won’t matter if I get penalised for a while.

At first, everything seemed fine, but after 6 days (15th Feb), I noticed a huge drop in traffic (from around 1,000 unique visits per day to about 500). See the graph:

I took a look at my website stats, and I could see that the traffic from google, yahoo and MSN search results, had dropped almost immediately after implementing exitjunction, but this drop was masked by an increase in direct and referred traffic (until all traffic dropped after 6 days). See graph:

So, I decided to take out exitjunction, and the search engine traffic started improving, but only slightly.

Luckily, the overall traffic didn’t drop to almost zero… thanks in large part to entrecard traffic… Thank you EntreCard!

Maybe it will take a few weeks for traffic to return to normal… I hope!

The income from people clicking on exitjunction ads was lower than what I get from adsense, so removing exitjunction was an easy decision.

I can only hope that at some point in the future, google and exitjunction will play together nicely. But for now, I’m putting exitjunction on the back burner.

Why does exitjunction affect search traffic?