My AdSense for search seems to be a lot higher than usual. For example, on a website where I run ads and search, I get about 2% CTR with the ads and as high as 35% CTR for search. Is this normal? The AdSense search CTR being higher than the ads one?
If your account shows any unusual click activity, this could be that some trying to get your account banned. You should report this to Google to be on the safer side. There is a special form to report invalid or unusual click activity at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py
I think it is perfectly normal. My CTR ranges between 5-7% where as for search, it sometimes go up to 45%. This has been going for a long time with out any problem
From my experience it's normal, my adsense for search also has a high CTR compared to the regular ads.
Maybe depends on the niche/site layout. I currently have an 0% ctr search and a 3-6% CTR regular adds.
I would suggest to keep a close eye on those clicks. Make sure the competition is not clickbombing you. 35% is a bit high in my opinion.
For searches sometimes I've got CTR higher than 200%. Why? Just model the behavior of simple user who searching for let say "chicken diner" and do not know anything about google ads. What this user will do the search results window? usually - open all references with nice snippets, and bearing in mind that it is approximately 4 google adds we will see how this user give CTR 400% from one search. This is why the search adds usually much cheaper.
AdSense for Search actually have a very big CTR because the ads look very much like search results, so people click them a lot. I get sometimes 80% CTR.