Pros and Cons of AdSense For Search
AdSense for Search has both pros and cons. A recent thread on Digital Point got me thinking about this.
Pros:
- Search can bring in extra revenue. On the other hand most people report that the revenue from this is a very small percentage of their overall AdSense revenue.
- It can provide a service for your visitors. Visitors may appreciate being able to search your site.
- It can increase your stickiness. If visitors use site search they may look at more pages, giving them more chances to click on the regular AdSense ads.
Cons:
- It can take users away from your site. If users use web search you can loose them.
On the surface it seems to me that the pros outweigh the cons. It comes down to if the extra revenue you get from the search outweighs the potential users you may lose from doing web searches.
I think the only way to know for sure is to try an experiment. I may try writing a little script that puts the AdSense for Search on the page on even days but not odd days. This way I can see how it affects the number of pages per visitor. If more users are leaving a site because they do web searches the average number of pageviews per user should decrease. If more users are using site search and finding useful information, the number of pageviews should increase.
The one thing that harder to measure is the fact that users may appreciate the usefulness of having a search available.
If anyone has any other pros or cons or has run this type of experiment before I’d love to hear about it.
Kevin Kennedy-Spaien Said,
October 10, 2005 @ 10:11 am
I plan on implementing a site search php script that generates a results page I can populate with adsense. Adsense targeting can be achieved by putting the search results and query inside a set of section targeting tags.
This provides site search for my readers and (potentially) higher revenues for me.