Why More AdSense Advertisers are Posting on the Search Results Page?

Google provides advertisers who are interested in using Google’s AdSense program to promote their product with two options. The advertiser can chose to have their advertisements posted on individual websites, or they can opt to have their advertisements on the search results pages. Although there are several advertisers who still exclusively post on individual websites and even more that post on both places, more and more advertisers are starting to post exclusively on the search results pages.

Google Adsene

There is a really good reason why so many advertisers now prefer the search results page over individual websites. The most obvious reason is that it provides them with an opportunity to reach a much larger group of people. When you post on a website you are only able to attract the people that are actually coming to the website. When you advertise on the search results page you are reaching not just the people looking for that website, but also ones that are looking for a different website.

Click Fraud

The second reason so many advertisers chose to advertiser on the search results page is because they are becoming increasingly worried about something called click fraud. Click fraud is a term that is used to refer to the clicking of a link for no other reason than to either make more money from AdSense. Some webmasters have gone so far as to hire people to sit around all day clicking advertiser links. The true victims of click fraud are the advertisers who have to pay each time their advertisement is clicked.

Bad Matches

Other advertisers have chosen to just place their advertisements on the search results page because they have no way of knowing why someone is visiting a particular website. Although Google tries to match a particular advertisement to a specific type of content, things don’t always work the way they should and some advertisers have found their ads in places that the link would never get clicked. Some webmasters have complained that the ads that Google has placed on their websites have offended the visitors to the website

A Change in Ideas

When AdSense was first created, the idea was to use web content to match an advertiser to a website. It made sense to place an link to a website that sold discount bird seed on a website that helped people identify wild birds. What many advertisers have found is that this actually limits the amount of customers they can appeal to. In order to reach a wider range of customers they also had to have links placed on websites that sold bird cages, taught people how to care for birds, and people that were interested in bird watching. By placing an link to their website on the search results page they could reach all those people an have fewer links.