Understanding AdSense for Search

People find content on the Internet by searching for it. This is a simple
fact of life. You know it, I know it, and the folks at AdSense know it. You
can take advantage of this simple fact of life by installing AdSense search
capabilities on your site, capabilities that allow site visitors to either search
your site or search the whole Internet, all the while providing for a nice little
revenue stream back to your pockets.
If yours is a site that’s hundreds of pages deep, such a search capability for
both the site and the Web is essential. Even if you have a smaller site though,
search is an important element. Users may come to your site and find only
part of what they’re looking for. How will they find the rest of it? Whether
it’s on your site or not, you need to provide visitors with a way to find what
they’re looking for.
AdSense for Search gives you the search capabilities you need, but you have
to use it well. You have to work through a few things, including figuring out
how your revenues will be made and what kind of search options will be best
for the visitors who come to your site. You also have to think about whether
it’s worth customizing your search box. (Hey, adding your own logo is a
nice touch!) All these options make creating your search box a little more
involved than creating ads for content — the stuff I cover in Chapter 7 — but
I walk you through the rough parts.

Searching for Revenues

When it comes to searches that really turn up results, Google is the King of
the Hill. A dozen or so other search engines are out there, and some of them
even offer search capabilities for Web sites and enterprises; but none of them
match the power of Google and none of them have gained the confidence
of users like Google has. Google’s known for results, and that’s why using
AdSense for Search makes so much sense.
If you’ve had a Web site for any amount of time, you’ve probably already discovered
that you must have search capabilities on your site. Whether those
search capabilities are only for your Web site or are for the entire Web is a
decision that’s best based on the amount of content you have on your site,
but it’s probably no secret to you that users want search capabilities. In fact,
you may have already added Google Search to your Web site, using either
Google’s free search capabilities or the Google Custom Search Engine.
So, if you’ve already added Google Search to your site or you’ve strongly
considered doing so, why not go the extra mile and add a search capability
that makes you a little bit of money? Admittedly, AdSense for Search probably
won’t ever make you as much money as AdSense for Content, but that
shouldn’t stop you from trying. Why let even a little bit of potential coin surf
away from your site untapped?
Here’s how it works: A visitor to your site types a search query into your
AdSense-enabled Google search box in hopes of finding something either on
the Web as a whole or just on your Web site. You don’t get paid just because
the visitor used the search box on your Web site. Instead, you get paid if that
visitor clicks one of the ads in the search results that are shown from the
search box that you put on your page. It’s a secondary-click revenue stream,
which means that, with AdSense for Search, the revenues are admittedly a
little harder to get to. Visitors must first use the search box and then click
through an ad for you to get paid.
Just because it’s not a direct click doesn’t mean you should ignore the
potential of this AdSense approach. The fact is that every site has visitors
that won’t find exactly what they’re looking for. If they found your site with
a search engine, they’ll likely go back to that search engine and refine their
search term. If they found your site directly and it doesn’t contain what they
want, they’ll probably surf away to search for what they want.
Also, if you already have search capabilities on your site, visitors who use
those capabilities are already seeing the ads that are shown in the search
results. You’re just not getting paid for them. If you have the capability
anyway, you should at least be able to collect revenue from increasing
Google’s confidence level.
Besides, if the visitor will leave your site anyway to search for the information
she’s looking for, why not give her the option of searching from your
site? The visitor benefits in time saved, and you benefit in the possible revenue
stream.
Plenty of options for the types of search you can allow are available, too.
Users can
Conduct a site search
Conduct a Web search
Conduct a targeted search
See results returned on your Web site
See results returned on the Google site
It’s not just plain vanilla search, in other words. You can really punch up
your search capabilities so that your site visitors can search with style and
find what they’re looking for. You can even direct the search so that users
aren’t pulling information from your competition.

Search in Style

AdSense for Search is a capability that’s automatically enabled if you’re registered
with AdSense at all. So, if you’ve created AdSense ads for your Web
site content before now, you won’t have any problems creating your first
AdSense search box. (If you haven’t created an AdSense ad or even created
your AdSense account, flip to Chapter 2, where I cover all the details you
need for getting your ads off the ground.)
It should only take a few minutes to create a search box for your Web site.
I spell out the basics of setting up a search box in Chapter 5 — you know,
logging on to your AdSense account, clicking the AdSense Setup tab, and
then making your way through the AdSense for Search Wizard to generate
the HTML code for your Web site — but I want to show you some of the
tweaks available to you. For that, make your way to the AdSense Setup tab
and click the AdSense for Search button. (If you need to refresh your memory
on how to do that, check out Chapter 5.) Doing so calls up the first screen of
a wizard that walks you through customizing your
search box. (Note that AdSense likes to keep things as simple as possible,
so the customization page for search boxes is very similar to the content ad
customization page.) With the first screen up and ready on your monitor,
you’re ready to tweak your search box however you want to. The next few
sections show you how.
Web and site searches
The first decision you have to make when it comes to designing your search
box is whether to allow your users to search only the Web as a whole or to
allow them to search the Web as well as your site or other sites that you
choose. If your site is relatively small (under a couple dozen pages), there’s
probably no sense in having a site search capability unless there are other,
specific sites that you want search results drawn from. This is a function that
works well if you have multiple Web sites and want to keep your sites in front
of your site visitors as much as possible. If you have a single site, with just a
few pages, it’s not quite as useful.
The more pages you have, the more difficult it is for your site visitors to find
what they’re looking for, so you should definitely include site search capabilities
in the mix. The search boxes look a little different, depending on the capabilities
that you allow.
The top section of the first screen of the AdSense for Search Wizard (refer to
Figure 8-1) is where you set up your Search Type options. Selecting the Google
WebSearch radio button sets up the Web only search, whereas selecting the
Google WebSearch + SiteSearch radio button lets you specify three specific sites
to search. (You enter the URLs for your three sites in the text fields provided.)
Figure 8-2 shows the AdSense example for a search box that searches the
Web as well as Web sites that you specify. You can enter URLs for up to three
different Web sites that visitors can then search either individually or as part
of a larger search.
Which type of search is more effective for your site is determined by the site
content and by what you hope to accomplish with an AdSense search box. If
you have multiple sites, you can keep them in front of your site visitors even
if your visitors don’t find what they need on the current site. Use AdSense
search to provide for as many of your site visitors’ needs as possible even if
your sites won’t answer their questions.
The middle and bottom sections of the AdSense for Search Wizard’s first
screen (refer to Figure 8-1) let you customize the appearance of the search
box itself as well as set a few other preferences. Neat stuff that I cover in sufficient
detail — but not now. (I lead you back to the wizard in the “Creating
an AdSense Search Box section,” later in this chapter.) Right now I want to
introduce you to a more high-powered way to customize your search engine
with the Google Custom Search Engine page.
Creating customized searches
One other option for creating a search box for your Web site is to create a
customized search engine. This isn’t exactly a feature of AdSense, but instead
is a separate Google capability that works with AdSense so that you can monetize
the search capabilities that you give to users while directing it much
more specifically.
A custom search engine is a creator-defined search capability, so you can
specify which Web sites (or even which pages) you want to allow your visitors
to search. The really cool thing about a custom search engine is that you can
have more than the three sites that AdSense makes available for searches with
an AdSense-specific search box. So if you want to allow your visitors to search
7, 15, or even 50 specific sites, a custom search engine is the way to go.
Before you can connect custom search capabilities to your AdSense account,
you must first create a custom search engine. Here’s how:
1. Point your browser to http://www.google.com/coop/cse.
The Google Custom Search Engine page appears.
2. Click the Create Custom Search Engine button.
3. In the new page that appears, enter your username and password in
the space provided and then click Sign In.
You can use the same username and password you use for your
AdSense account.
4. In the new page that appears, enter the setup information for your
search engine,
This information includes
• A name and description for your search engine.
• Keywords that define the topic of your search engine.
• The main language for your search engine.
• Your choice on the scope of the search. You can limit the search
to specific sites or you can also set up your search so that it either
searches the whole Web or the whole Web with emphasis on the
sites that you specify.
If you’ve decided to specify certain sites to be included in your
search parameters, you can list the specific URLs you want to
allow in the text box provided. Go ahead and choose as many sites
as you like. You’re allowed up to 5,000 specific sites, which are
also called annotations.
• The specific edition of the customized search engine you want to
use. The standard edition is free but requires that you allow ads to
be shown. The business edition allows you to create a customized
search engine with no ads.
• An I Have Read and Agree to the Terms of Service check box.
(Okay, it doesn’t sound much like setting anything up, but if you
don’t select this check box, you’re stuck in an eternal loop you’ll
never break out of.)
5. After you fill in all the requested information — and agree to the
terms of service — click the Next button.
6. On the second page of the wizard, test your search engine by running
a test query.
The results from the test are shown on the page,
7. After you test it, you can select the Send Confirmation Email To . . .
check box near the bottom of the page to have a confirmation message
sent to your Inbox.
The confirmation message provides links to additional information and
capabilities, such as managing your custom search engine. This isn’t
a required option, but I suggest that you select it for at least the first
search engine that you create.
8. Click Finish to be taken to your main Google Custom Search Engine page.
Google Custom Search Engine is a beta program, which means it’s still in the
testing phases even though it’s available to the general public. Beta programs
sometimes have glitches or bugs and don’t work exactly as they should, so
keep your eyes open for anything out of the ordinary and expect changes in
the future. After the program’s been sufficiently tested and improved, it comes
out of beta testing and becomes a general release program, which means that
the glitches and bugs are less likely to occur and updates to the program
happen less often and on more regular schedules.
Now you have a custom search engine. Just because you have it doesn’t
mean that you’ll start earning money from it, though. You still need to connect
your Custom Search Engine account to your AdSense account before
you can get paid for the ads that appear on the search results page.
1. Point your browser to http://www.google.com/coop/cse.
The Google Custom Search Engine page appears.
2. Click the Manage Your Existing Search Engines link.
If you’re not automatically logged in to your account, you may be
prompted for your username and password. If needed, enter your e-mail
address and password in the spaces provided and click Log In.
You’ll be taken to the Manage Search Engines page,
3. Click the Control Panel link.
The Control Panel page appears,
4. Click the Make Money link at the top of the Control Panel page
5. In the new page that appears select the I
Already Have an AdSense Account radio button.
The Existing AdSense User form appears,
By the way, I’m assuming here that you do have an AdSense account. If
you don’t, choose the I am a New AdSense User option, which takes you
to set up an AdSense account.
6. Fill in the information requested to link your AdSense account and
then click the Submit button.
It’s simple information: e-mail address, zip code, phone number, and a
drop-down menu from which you can select your location.
If all the information matches, you receive a confirmation letting you know
the two accounts are now connected. Being connected simply means that
your search box not only appears on your page but also sends information
about ads that appear in search results to your AdSense account. That
means that when your visitors use your custom search box to search for
something and then click an ad while they’re viewing the search results,
you get paid for it just as if you were using an AdSense for Search box.
Now, you may be wondering why in the world you’d go to all this trouble to
add a customized search engine to your Web site when AdSense has similar
controls built into the AdSense for Search capability. The answer is: It’s all
about control.
You can use the AdSense for Search Wizard to customize your search engine —
specifying whether users can search the Web or other sites, for example, or customizing
the appearance of the search engine that you make available from your
site. Those capabilities are limited with AdSense though. (You can only specify
up to three sites for customized searches, for example.)
If you really want to make an impact with your search engine capabilities,
using a Google Custom Search Engine is the way to go. You can add more
Web sites to the SiteSearch capabilities, and you can further customize the
search engine to reflect your style and the design of your Web site.
Many companies or Web site owners that have a large number of pages or
a complex forum system use the Google Custom Search Engine because it
makes their site and their site capabilities more valuable to site users. It’s
really your call though. If there’s no added value in creating a custom engine,
don’t put the time into it. I’m always an advocate for anything that adds value
to site visitors because those visitors really do remember (and revisit) the
sites that they find most useful.
So, that’s it. Now you have a custom search engine connected to your
AdSense account, providing an additional revenue stream — and you know
what makes it valuable to you! You can also go back into your Custom Search
Engine account at any time and tweak the search engine you created by
changing the Web sites that it searches or even the look of the search engine.
To change the way your custom search engine looks, try this:
1. Log in to your custom search engine Control Panel, as outlined in the
previous steps, and then click the Control Panel link for the search
engine that you want to customize.
Doing so opens the Control Panel page for that search engine.
2. On the Control Panel page, select the Look and Feel link to be taken
to the Customize Your Search Box page.
On this page, you have several options for changing the appearance of
your search box, including different logo configurations and color options.
3. In the first section of the page, select how you
want the Google custom search box to appear on your page and then
click the Save Changes button.
4. In the next section, , customize the colors of
the border, title, background, text, links, visited links, and cached
links and then click the Save Changes button.
You can do this by choosing the desired colors from the Color Picker —
the small colored boxes next to each option — or by entering the hexadecimal
numbers that represent the colors.
The results of the changes you make are displayed in the sample above
the color options.
5. To add your personalized logo, enter the URL for the logo in the
Image URL text box,
If you don’t know what the URL is, you can open another browser window
and go to your Web site. Then right-click the logo of your site and select
Copy Image Location, flip back to the Google Custom Search Engine customization
page, and paste the URL into the text box provided.
You also have the option to link your logo to a specific Web site. For
example, if you want your logo to appear on the search results page and
to link back to your main Web site, then enter the main URL for your
Web site in the Link Logo to URL text box.
6. When you’ve entered the logo and link information, click the Save
Changes button.
The small sample display above the logo and link text boxes displays
your logo if you choose to use this option.
Although all three of these customization options are on one page, you don’t
have to change them all at the same time. You can change any single option
on the page without affecting the other options. If you want to change the
colors, but leave the logo you already have in place, or even leave it off completely,
adjust your color settings and click the Save Changes button, and only
the changes you actually want will take effect.

Creating an AdSense Search Box

I’m the first to say that custom search engines are pretty cool, but they’re
not necessary for every Web site. If you don’t need a custom search engine, a
regular AdSense search box works just fine.
I spend some time earlier in this chapter profiling the wizard that helps you
create the search box, and filling you in on your options when it comes to specifying
the types of searches the AdSense search box can perform. Now I want to
show you how to create the search box from A to Z — all the way from specifying
the kind of search box you want to generating the HTML code you need to
place on your Web site so you can finally start earning some money from it. It’s
not too tough — I’d say it’s fifth-grade-science-project easy — and should take
you less time than brewing your first cup of coffee in the morning (unless you
have a Bunn Coffee Maker — those take like three minutes, so you’d have to
hurry to beat one). Here’s how it’s done:
1. Point your browser to http://www.adsense.com, log on to your AdSense
account, and then click the AdSense Setup tab.
2. On the Setup tab, select the AdSense for Search option.
Doing so calls up the AdSense for Search Wizard (refer to Figure 8-1).
3. In the Search Type section of page, select the radio button corresponding
to the type of search you want the search box to perform: Google
WebSearch or Google WebSearch + SiteSearch.
4. In the Search Box Style section of the page, use the options to customize
the look of your search box.
As Figure 8-13 shows, you have two options for logo styles and several
different combinations of styles that can change the look of your
search box.
Your options include
• Google Logo: If you select the Logo Above Text Box check box, the
Google logo appears above the search box. If you leave this box
deselected, the Google logo appears to the left of the text box.
• “Google Search” on Button: Selecting this option ditches the
Google logo and just puts the Google name on the search button.
• Search Button Below Text Box: If you select this check box, the
Search button (the thing a user clicks to start a search) appears
under the search box. Otherwise, the button appears to the right
of the search box.
• Background color and text color: Here you can use a drop-down
menu to select the color that you want to use as your search box
background — your choices here are white, black, or gray — as
well as specify if you want the text to be black or white.
• Text box length: Here you can choose the number of characters
that you want to allow in the search box. The default is 31 characters,
but you can change that to whatever length suits you.
5. In the More Options section, select the main language for your search
box from the drop-down menu.
This setting refers to the language of your Web site. Visitors can choose
to search in their own native language if it’s different than the one you
select, but you still have to make a choice from more than 30 selections
available in the drop-down menu.
6. Still in the More Options section of the page, choose the site encoding
you’ll use for your Web page from the Your Site Encoding drop-down
menu.
Site encoding here refers to the computer language or code that your site
is created in. (Even if you’re using HTML, there are several versions of
it.) The default is set to West European Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). If you don’t
know what the encoding for your site is, leave the default in place.
7. Select the country your domain is registered in from the Country
drop-down menu and then click Continue to go to the second page of
the wizard.
The second page,, is where you customize the
look of your search results page.
8. In the second page of the wizard, select the color template you want
to use for the search results page from the drop-down menu at the
center-right.
You have six palettes to choose from, but keep in mind that you can skip
the palettes and just enter hexadecimal numbers for custom colors in
the appropriate text boxes — Border, Title, Background, for example —
to precisely match your Web site. (Chapter 7 has more on hexadecimal
numbers and how you can use them to match the colors of your search
box to the colors on your Web site.)
9. To add your own corporate logo to your search results page, enter the
URL where the logo is located in the Logo Image URL text box.
Note: If you want your logo to appear above the search box, select the
Above Search Box check box. Otherwise, the logo appears to the left of
the box.
10. (Optional) Add a Logo Destination URL.
The Logo Destination URL is optional, but should you decide to use it,
this will link your logo back to a Web page that you specify. That can be
the main page of your Web site or any other page that you choose.
11.
select where you want the search results to appear.
Your choices here are
• On Google, in the Same Window: Opening search results on
Google in the same window replaces your Web page with the
Google page. It’s streamlined — no additional windows are opened
— but it also leads visitors away from your Web site. The concern
with leading visitors away is that they won’t click back and you’ll
lose them completely. The tradeoff is that opening the results on
Google’s pages gives your site visitors confidence that their search
is being done by the best search engine on the Web.
• On Google, in a New Window: Opening search results in a new
window is an excellent way to ensure that your site remains open
for users and that the user also feels the confidence that comes
with seeing Google-logoed pages. A second window (or tab, if you’re
using a Web browser that supports tabbed browsing) opens with
the search results, but your Web site also remains open. When users
finish browsing search results, they can close the window in which
the search results are displayed, but your Web site will still be open.
That’s no guarantee that the visitor will continue surfing your site —
he could close your site, too — but it does leave the possibility that
he’ll continue surfing through your pages.
• On Your Own Web Site: Opening search results on your Web site
keeps the user on your site, but also strips away some of the confidence
that comes with Google search results. The search results
are stylized to match your site, but still contain the Google logo.
They’re just not actual Google pages, which could erode user
confidence some.
12. If you want to enable site-flavored searches, select the Customize the
Type of Search Results I Get to My Site Content check box.
Site-flavored search is a progressive technology — meaning that the
results get more accurate over time — that pulls search results that are
related to the content of your Web site. In the beginning, search results
are more general, but over time the results become more refined and
better related to your site content.
13. If you want to use the SafeSearch option, select the Use SafeSearch
check box.
SafeSearch filters out nearly all the adult content (such as pornography)
from search results.
14. Select a Custom Channel for tracking earning results from the dropdown
menu of custom channels that you’ve created.
Remember, channels are basically a tagging method that allows you to
track specific ads or groups of ads.
15. Select Continue to generate the search box code, as shown in
Figure 8-16, for pasting into your Web site.
nitely
don’t want to go crazy with all the colors. The last thing you want to do
is create a kaleidoscope that gives your site visitors headaches.
A better option is to stick to standard design principles and have a single
color for the background — preferably one that matches the background of
your Web site — and then use no more than three colors in the foreground.
For example, if you have a basic white background for your Web site, that
counts as one color.
Then, you can style your text in black, links that haven’t been clicked as blue,
and links that have been clicked as red. Including the white background, you
have four total colors. Four colors won’t jar the user, and your search results
will still look very professional.
After you generate the code for your search box, copy and paste the code
onto your Web page in the same way that you copy and paste AdSense for
Content code. It may take a little tweaking to get the search box in exactly
the spot you want it, but you can move it around with your HTML editor to
ensure that it appears in the proper place.
AdSense for Search and WordPress
In many ways, WordPress is different from
other kinds of blogging programs. At its core,
WordPress is a good blogging program; but
because it’s so customizable at the code level, it
has much more power than other blogging applications.
That also happens to mean that some
things just aren’t as easy with WordPress.
Installing an AdSense search box in Blogger is
pretty straightforward. You create the search
box in AdSense, copy the code, and use an
HTML widget to insert it in your blog. With
WordPress, the process is much more difficult
and requires that you edit the core code of
the WordPress blog page where you want the
search box to appear.
Here’s an easier way — MightySearch is a
WordPress plugin from MightyHitter (www.
mightyhitter.com) that’s designed to
let you paste in your AdSense for Search code
and it will make the code work properly on your
WordPress blog. The plugin handles all the
details that could take you forever to figure out
if you’re not a WordPress genius.
Adding search capabilities to your site just
makes sense. Chances are that you won’t have
every detail that your site visitors are looking for
on your Web site. Why not make it easy for them
to find what you don’t have? In the process,
you can add to your AdSense revenue stream.
Nothing wrong with making some money on the
information you don’t have on your site, too.
One thing you should know about designing your search box is that with the
customization that’s available, you can change the look of the search box
completely. You should not, however, change the color of the search button.
Because it’s Google and people trust Google, they’ll recognize the gray search
button, and they’re more likely to use it. If you change the search button, visitors
could mistake your search box for something belonging to some other
search company, and their confidence in finding what they’re looking for
might not be as high.
Adding search capabilities through AdSense makes sense whether you have
a site of 5 pages or 500. Users may come to your site and find everything they
need, but if they don’t, they’ll go somewhere to search out the answers they
seek. Give them a search box linked directly from your site, and you’ll not
only help them out, but you might gain a little financial reward in the process.