In the 5+ years that I’ve been working with Adsense, I have never tried out Google Adsense for search. Until a month ago. I have always assumed that search CPC rates would be higher than content CPC because it seems to be industry standard, not just with Google but also on other PPC platforms like Bing. With that in mind, I decided to test out Adsense for search on one of my sites getting around 5 search queries per day.
Out of those search queries, I received at least 1 ad click per day. Wow, was I wrong! Adsense for search pays significantly less than Adsense for content. On the average, the CPC was about 4 cents. That’s bad by any standards. No, thanks! I think I’ll keep my visitors for that kind of money.
According to this post on the Google Adsense blog, Adsense for search partners are supposed to receive 51% of the revenue. So, am I to believe that these advertisers are only spending 8 cents per click? I don’t buy it. There’s something amiss here, but I’m not sure what it is and I haven’t been able to find much information on it. Perhaps there’s some sort of an algorithm for newly implemented search pages? Maybe there’s a testing period for new Adsense for search partners?
I’ve been running Adsense for search for about a month, and the earnings have not changed. So, until I find more information about why Adsense for search doesn’t pay well, I’ll just stick to Adsense for content.