I run a site in a niche sector. I have just completely redeveloped the site from the ground up and our sales team have been approached by an agency to run skyscraper ads on the new site for a major client.

Years ago, I did similar on an ecommerce site for a major plc and it was a complete disaster. The bounce rate increased a huge amount and I was losing large amounts of traffic to the ads.

Is this still the case? I need some help urgently because I have a meeting with the sales manager and MD later today.

Have you had a bad experience with them in the past?

I guess you'd also have to wonder how much money you can actually make from online advertising vs. the value of that space to try and improve e-commerce sales and conversion rates?

In my experience if you're talking run of site skyscrapers sold by a third party agency you're highly unlikely to make much money from that advertising. So quite apart from the user experience I'd question the business case for doing this versus, say, using that space to better capture email addresses for a newsletter or promoting free delivery or whatever.