Shopping Carts and Adsense

Both on the same site?

[persepee]

This question probably requires a bit of background.

About six months ago I opened my first online store. It was an Ebay store. Sometime later, I became interested in SEO and I created a free information site to compliment my store.

To begin with, only people who purchased something from my Ebay store visited the site because I could not get any search engine traffic. So, I added Adsense to the site and the money I made covered my hosting costs.

Then, the site took off in the SERPs and I suddenly began seeing a lot of more visitors there than I did on my Ebay store. Ebay's costs were cutting into my profit margin so I decided to close that store and build my own shopping cart.

It took about a month to complete and by this time I was making about $600 a month off Adsense. Because of this, I went ahead and added the shopping cart but I did not remove the Adsense from my original articles.

Now, I am a student and I need the Adsense money the original site makes to survive on so I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole. But I am about to open my second online store and I have pretty much followed the original site's design. Write articles (with Adsense) first and try to make the site popular then add the shopping cart onto it.

But, I am just not sure if I should take the Adsense off the new site or not. Analyzing my original site, I discovered that roughly 10% of the visitors which start on an article page end up going to a shopping cart page.

My Adsense CTR is typically around 10% so I figure that I am better off with Adsense. The 10% that go to the shopping cart are not making as much for me as the 10% who click on Adsense.

But, maybe those 10% are far more likely to buy something? Also, it puts me in the odd position of advertising for my competitors, who sometimes carry the exact same line of products that I do.

Does anyone have any actual experience with Adsense and shopping carts on the same site?

[uhzoomzip]

I recently started doing that. I did the opposite. I sold items first then added content pages later. The way I have it set up is that I advertise products that are similar. For instance I sell funny widgets and they sell serious widgets. I don't carry serious widgets so I don't care if a customer goes somewhere else to get serious widgets. I haven't seen any decline in sales whatsoever and I think the reason is that the terms people are searching for in the search engines are going to those pages and they generally aren't the terms someone would have searched to find my site anyway. I make more than enough for it to be worthwhile and I will continue to experiment and probably even do it on any future sites.

oh and you can block competitors ads from showing on adsense.