AdSense on an affiliate portal

With traffic driven by AdWords

[ecole]

I'm setting up a widget portal that will display the lowest prices and info for widgets sold by a variety of widget selling companies. Each of these widget selling companies has an affiliate program, which is where I intend to get most of the income from. I intend to drive traffic to the site initially using AdWords.

My question is, do you think I should run AdSense adverts initially on my widget portal? Nearly all of the widget selling companies advertise on AdWords at the moment.

The pros and cons I can see are:

Pros of an Adsense click = guaranteed income that would partially negate the cost of the AdWords click to my portal

Cons of an Adsense click = substantially less than a possible sale from a click on the affiliate link

This may belong in the affiliate forum but since it's a question primarily about AdSense I thought I would post it here first.

What are your thoughts?

[wyweb]

This is sort of dealers choice ecole. I wrestled with the same issue for a long time before I added adsense to my widget affiliate sites - then started earning adsense income and kicked myself in the boo-boo for not having started sooner.

One way of looking at it is that someone who is leaving your site is apparently not interested in your widgets. Presumably they've looked around and now they're looking for a way out. I prefer to provide that way out for them via adsense ads.

Can you lose sales this way? Yes, undoubtedly you can. You can also get paid via someone who doesn't want to buy your widgets and is leaving anyway. An exit toll, someone called it, and that's exactly how I prefer to think of it.

What you might do is bring the ads in and watch your sales closely to see if they suffer. Mine didn't, at least not enough to offset the adsense earnings. Try it both ways and monitor your conversions closely. I doubt my experience is typical.

[Knappster]

I agree with wyweb. In my case, the company with the affiliate program also (almost invariably) offered the best-paying AdSense clicks for my niche. I decided to add AdSense, in part because the company offered a durable cookie (far more durable than, say, Amazon's 24-hour variety). I figured there was a good chance visitors would click both an affiliate link and an AdSense ad, and my cookie might linger long enough to earn me credit for a future sale.

Your results may vary.