Hi Guys,

I'm thinking of trying Adsense for search in the next couple days. Is Adsense for search effective in earning more cash than using the standard Adsense for content? If you have any tips for implementing it, please let me know as well.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Well, for seaching your own domain i would suggest using your own search engine with better Adsense Ad placing. Its more effective this way. The Search Bar doesnt deliver as much as it would with better placing..

Ah, I see. Thank you very much!

Well you can only get some good money of it if you get a million searches a month.

Akash

Thank you guys.

Yeah it's really hard. The only problem really is the fact that those search results from adsense pay so low.

Thank You

Well, I've tried it and I got a lotta click thru but low payoff !!

Does Google pay only for the first search click? All the other clicks in the results, or only if the user clicks on one of Google's sponsored links in the search result?

If you have high traffic but I hear people say it doesnt pay much. There are rumors that you earn only when a person clicks a link the results displays.

That's what Google says, and that's why I don't think it will make much money.

Not only does it not pay much, but the search results will only contain the pages that Google has indexed. So you may have thousands of pages on your site, but only a few might actually show up when visitors use the Google Search.

This situation can improve as time goes by, but only if your pages have content that Google deems worthy of indexing. So you might actually get fewer search results over time if Google starts pulling your pages from its index.

I'm using Google search on only one of my sites, and I make zero money from it. I just keep it there because because I haven't had time yet to build my own search routine, but hope to squeeze it in sometime soon.

Tony I think with AdSense search you're only going to get paid when someone clicks one of the paid search listings. One point no one mentioned is that because people are naturally in search mode while searching, they're probably more likely to click on something. It may not be the paid listing, but I would expect a pretty high CTR on one of the results.

You can also build a custom search engine through Google co-op where you could select the URLs to be searched. For example you have an online coupon site in your sig. You could build a search engine to only include domains of coupon sites you trust.

By creating a niche and targeted search engine you might further increase the click throughs on the results.

I haven't tried AdSense for search myself at the moment, but I would think traffic is going to play a really big part in how much you can earn since you won't really have control over ad type and position and all those other things to try to increase CTR.

Thanks for that link Steven.

Unfortunately, you can only specify domains to search, not individual pages... so you're still limited to what's in Google's index.

From the FAQ on that link:

24. Why does my Custom Search Engine not show the results that I expect when I do a search?

• If you are seeing more results than you expect, make sure that you have selected that you want to search only the sites you provide, not the entire web, in your Custom Search Engine control panel.
• If you are not seeing a particular result that you expect:
  • Make sure that you have included the result or the pattern matching the result in your Custom Search Engine. Beware of spelling mistakes!
  • Make sure the page you expect to see is in the Google index. A simple way of checking is to do a search on Google with the site: operator along with a few words on that page as a search query. Please visit Google Webmaster Central for more resources.
  • If your page does show up in the Google index, check to see if it is marked as a "Supplemental Result". Only some Custom Search Engines include supplemental results

Rick you're absolutely right. My apologies if I implied you could help get pages indexed using the custom search engine. Google is only going to search the pages they list in their index, though I would suspect if you had pages in the supplemental index they would show up in results more frequently in a custom search engine that included you domain than they would in the general search engine.

But you are right. This isn't going to get pages searched that aren't indexed and it isn't going to get more pages indexed.

Thank you guys.

Do not use them. You only waste traffic.

This thread got me thinking more seriously about Adsense for Search, and I decided to replace the custom search page on my software download site with Google's Search box.

I am happy to report that it's been a big success so far. I'm not making millions... lol, or even tens at this point, but I am making a couple bucks a day on it and suspect that will improve over time as Google indexes more and more of my 27000+ pages.

Good to know Rick. One thing to track might also be how many less downloads happen on the site. It would be interesting to see if most of the people who were downloading still are or how many are now leaving through one of the ads.

Since I don't make money on downloads, I'm happy to lose traffic to google clicks that actually pay. I make way more on advertising with this site than I do on purchases. There are too many loopholes with the affiliate process to make any money on affiliate sales with software downloads (imho).

But when companies contact me and pay $150 to advertise, it makes it worthwhile

Thanks for your comments on this thread - I appreciate your perspectives.

Yeah I guess if you don't make anything on the downloads it's not quite as important. Keep us updated how the AdSense search works. I have a hunch it will continue to work well, but do you find you get more of an average payout per click through the search? Does it result in a higher CTR?

Glad to help too.