From my experience, AdSense for Search churns out great CPM (at least in most cases, better than those for my AdSense for Content). The problem is that on average, very few people use the search feature on websites, translating into even fewer ad clicks. I’ve already written a post on how to try and boost your AdSense earnings, but here’s a few more little tweaks you can do, courtesy of Google’s AdSense blog.
They recently featured a site called CoolChaser, which is the go-to site for creating personalized MySpace themes. Founder Chao Lam and developer Sachiko Kwan thought about optimizing CoolChaser’s search feature and not surprisingly, ended up with Google.
They came up with the billiant idea of placing the search box top and center on the site’s header, where it sits prominently next to the their logo. Another thing they did was to put another search box at the bottom part of every page. The logic is that after people read the content of the current page, they may find the content lacking and want to search for other pages.
Here’s what CoolChaser looks like:
Last tweak they did was to replace the ad borders’ color with a lighter shade in the the search results page. The effect is that the ads blend better with the site’s other content, so it’s not jarring to look at them. All these changes were pretty simple and can be done in just a few minutes, but from their results so far, the impact is just amazing. First, their daily search queries increased by 40%, and second, site earnings grew by over 100%. Now that’s an improvement (and I sense a lot of people will be running off to edit their blog templates after reading this).
How about your site? Have you had any success with AdSense for Search?
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