Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Targeting Your Content For AdSense With Search

         The other significant change that Google introduced was to start tracking the
keywords that users look for in the AdSense for Search boxes. Until now if you
wanted to know what your users were looking for when they reached your site, you
had go through a complicated workaround that involved creating a special logo
then tracking that logo through your logs. The keywords that the user entered
appear as part of the URL on which your logo was called.

Frankly, I found that just too much effort for the sort of returns that AdSense
for Search brings on my sites but if it works for some people, good luck to
them.

Google's "Top Keywords" report now makes all that unnecessary though... almost.
It lets you see the keywords that users enter in your search box.

First, the downside: it doesn't tell you everything. A word has to be entered at
least twice before it becomes eligible to be on the list and you only receive
the most popular 25 search terms. So if you wanted to know every search that
your users made, you'd still have to use the workaround -- and spend hours
searching through giant URLs.

On the upside though, the keyword report does sound like a great way to get to
know your users a little better. If someone's entering a search term in your
AdSense for Search it's because they haven't found the content they were looking
for on your site. Once they leave your site through your search box though,
you'll only get paid if they click on an ad on the results page. That's your one
chance. If they don't click there, they're gone.

One strategy then might be to place an AdSense for Search box on your website
just to see what your users are looking for. You could then create your own
content for the top search terms, keeping your users on your site where you can
serve them more ads. For example, if you had a site about furniture and you
found that many of your users were looking for information about woodworking
tools, you could create extra pages about woodworking and optimize it for
AdSense. Why give users away when you can use the keyword report to find out
what they're interested in and advertise to them?

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