The Google search box is part of the Adsense program. AdSense matches up advertisers with potential customers via websites, such as this blog. People are familiar with the AdSense Content Match ads that appear on many websites. Those pay a modest amount per successful click. So if your page is about footwear, and Google pulls some ads from its pool of advertisers to put on your page, and low and behold, the reader clicks, your get a few pennies.
The return is set low simply because it is hard to tell what the reader was really looking for. Your page might be about shoes, but what if the reader was really looking for information about socks? All those shoe ads were useless to him.
The Google search box takes AdSense to the next level. If the reader is on your site, and types "socks" in the search box, Google will throw up a page with its top ranked socks pages. But above those links are the sponsored links. A sponsored link in this case is selected because of a "precision match". Unlike a content match, the precision match algorithm has positive knowledge of what the reader is interested in, because he provided that information in the search parameters. Because of the higher likelihood that the reader will actually buy something related to those keywords, advertisers pay more for precision matches, and subsequently the website owner throwing up that search page gets more money for each click.
Just one of those things people might not quite understand about how Google ads work.
That's why, as part of my redesign, I knew I was going to push the Google search box to the top of the page. But more importantly, I was going to integrate it much more tightly into my website.
Go ahead and do a search for something if you haven't already. Then come back (but please don't click on a sponsored link unless you are actually considering purchasing something -- advertisers have to pay Google each time someone clicks).
Because I've got discrete pages and a system for tracking the active tab, I've opted to incorporate the Google search results directly into the Angry in the Great White North page structure. What this does is keep my page front-and-centre for as long as possible before the reader jumps off into the search results, and it brings the user back to my blog in one less click. If the Google search does not offer up anything that satisfies the user's request, either in the sponsored precision match ads or in the search results, the user can navigate to other Angry in the Great White North pages without any trouble.
This is all designed to keep people on the blog longer, and to make it more likely that they will use the Google search box from any of my pages to search the web for something. That in turn increases the rate at which clicks are likely to happen. In the couple of hours since I've put the box back in, over 20 searches were initiated. None resulted in clicks and therefore there was no revenue, but this is a numbers game. Twenty searches in two hours translates to several thousand searches in a month -- and some percentage of those searches will result in clicks through the precision matches offered up by Google.
Remember that precision matches pay better than content matches.
Of course, nothing will keep the users on this blog or on yours, clicking away and generating revenue, except good content. Never lose sight of that. Still, assuming you provide good content, there is no reason not to make the best use of your traffic.
This is no ground-breaking secret here -- any well designed website will do the same thing. Still, few blogging websites seem to be designed to best optimize their traffic as a revenue stream. That's a shame, because making money by helping connect people with the good and services they are looking for makes everyone a winner.
