Seems no other Google category fits, so here is.... Anyone using the build-your-own search engine with Google? I picked the option to take benefit of the Adsense. What I've found unique over the past two weeks of trying it, is that the CTR with just AdSense ads on pages is slightly over 4%. (not the search engine part) But on my own version search engine placed in the site, it's displayed ads are showing a 25% CTR. Two weeks ain't long, but its a safe time frame. Now 5 days, I'd pass on that. Just started this Google option two weeks ago on two of my pages. (Oh crap... slow responses. This isn't sacred ground for people is it ?)
V interesting , I presume your targetting niche search results.... Have you a url to have a look? Not trying to steal your idea , just interesting !
Yeah.. sure.. I'm into my site for fun, mostly. I am serious about it, but make my money as an arborist / consultant. So even if I shared a clue to another landscape service and lost a few dollars from the site, I'd be fine. It may be that I just enjoy writing and organizing. Anyway, I put the first one here... http://www.mdvaden.com/advice.shtml On that Advice page, if you have IE or Firefox, you should see my favorite toy on the site which is the menu that slides out like a drawer from the side - courtesy of Dynamic Drive's batch of goodies. Easy to deal with, once I learned that the numbers by the links in the file code have to be consecutive. The first is tailored to my site. The second, is tailored to about 7 select horticulture site's URLs - and I opted to give those preference in the search, but not exclusive to the 7. By the way SEEN OREGON ?? Choose ALBUMS above for 2 reasons... One.... I have some decent Oregon albums - coast, forest, the fungi album is cool. Two... The online host is Image Event. I use their code scrap to load the album form their site into my own page layout. Instead of people going directly to http://imageevent.com/mdvaden they end up going to each album in my layout which has ads in it. That also helps, and I find that the particular ads on the image pages tend to be some of the better paying per click, although those albums don't get the traffic of my advice pages. Before I forget, I recalled a cool thing about the custom search engine... From my stats, I know what the average visitor duration is. Basically they are in and out, or they stay and read a bunch. If they come in for advice, which is what the site was promoted for besides my work, they will either realize that they found the right place, or not. If they don't want to stay, it means they are still searching for something horticultural. That means they can route through my search engine on their way out, rather than closing the tab and going back to google, ask or yahoo. When they exit via those two search engines, it means I get credit for the ad, rather than them, say, going back to google and google getting the credit for the add click. My customized search engines get less clicks by far than all the other pages, but the CTR is impressive. I'd imagine that the right SEO on the right sites, could make a big score - maybe not every site, but the right pages on the right sites.