Custom Search promotions made easier
May 18th, 2009 | Published in Google Custom Search
Last year, we made it easier to promote relevant information to the top of your search results for specific queries, but there were still a couple of steps you had to take to make this happen. So now, we've made it easier than ever to create promotions in Custom Search. You can quickly configure specific webpages or information to display above your search results for specific queries, allowing you to highlight key events, announcements, services or products.
We've added a new Promotions tab to the Custom Search control panel to help you manage all your promotions.
Creating a promotion is easy - decide on the queries that should trigger a specific promotion, select a title and URL for your promotion, and add optional information, such as description and image thumbnail. The promotion edit pane also shows a preview of your promotion.
When you're done, promotions will display in your search results for the queries that match your trigger list. You can test a promotion by issuing one of the trigger queries in the control panel results preview.
A few pointers:- you can control the look and feel of the promotions to distinguish them from regular search results (through Promotion Design Settings)
- you may want to create promotions to highlight information for popular queries on your search engine (use search statistics to identify them)
- you should delete promotions when they are no longer relevant
- our updated developer documentation includes more information on promotions
We hope to see useful promotions popping up in custom search results all over the web.
Don't miss the promotions when you search on the Custom Search website! We'd love to get your feedback on how we can make this feature even more useful.