If you\’ve been using AdSense for Search, you\’ll know that last year, Google shut it down. If you wanted to continue to offer your users a search function — and earn revenue from ad clicks when those users conducted their searches — you needed to use Google\’s Custom Search Engine and attach it to your AdSense account.
That wasn\’t such a big change. I\’ve always found AdSense for Search to be a useful additional revenue stream, but it\’s never been a main moneymaker. Creating a Custom Search Engine from inside AdSense is pretty simple and it does provide a few optimization features that AdSense for Search didn\’t have. You can help Google to deliver better search results, place those results in a frame on your own website, and even influence where the ads appear and what they look like.
Those are all useful tools that can help publishers squeeze a little more cash out of users leaving their sites through a search box.
But step out of AdSense and use the Custom Search Engine\’s own website to build your search box, and you\’ll find a few more opportunities that may be even more valuable.
Refinements, for example, can help your users to narrow down their searches with better targeting. It can also deliver more pages of search results and therefore more ad views. Autocompletions let you suggest keyword phrases that can generate higher paying ads.
Most importantly, promotions let you push your own Web pages above those of other sites, and even sell your own search ads directly to advertisers.
That\’s a huge change and it\’s one that I think few publishers are making use of.
Only a small fraction of users are going to search from your website, and for the most part, you don\’t want them to. If they\’re not going to click an affiliate link and make a purchase, they should be clicking an ad unit and paying through a click. AdSense units on your website will pay you 68 percent of the revenue their clicks generate; the same ad unit on a search page will only give you 51 percent of the revenue.
You really want the ad clicks to come on the site.
But if a user is going to leave anyway and head to Google, they should be leaving through your Google. And if you\’re building your own Custom Search Engine, there\’s no reason you can\’t break it out and turn it into the search engine for your niche. That will create a whole new search opportunity.