Show Thread Enhancements - "See More" Google Custom Search (Lite) - Increase Adsense revenue!

ForumSetup.net?s ?See More? Google Custom Search will allow visitors to easily find similar content on your site and increase your Adsense revenue! Many sites that have this modification installed have also reported a bump in pages per visitor and a decreased bounce rate as well!

How does it do this? A ?See More? link is inserted in the first post of a thread. If a user is coming from a search engine, the keyword they used to search will be used to link to a Google Custom Search to find more similar content on your site. If the modification cannot get the keyword or a user is browsing your site, the title of the thread will be used instead. The free version of Google Custom Search inserts relevant ads, increasing your Adsense revenue at the same time.

Features:

• Displays search results within your site (does not go to Google)
• Statistics in Google Analytics
• Customize the See More font and link
• Change ?See More? text to whatever you want
• Change the HTML around the See More link
• Option to show popular queries & the time period they are from

Pro only features:

• Option to show the See More link to members or specific usergroups
• Turn off showing the thread title as the See More link
• Choose from 4 different locations for the link (before/after first post, before/after signature)
• Replace the default vBulletin search box with Google Custom Search
• Option to show the replaced search box to members or specific usergroups
• Removes link to ForumSetup.net in footer

Case Studies & Reviews

Case Study: cellphoneforums.net
Cell Phone Forums saw a number of different positive metrics immediately after installing See More Google Custom Search. The See More link is set to display just below the first post content and thread titles are turned on.

• Bounce Rate decreased by 5.5%
• Pages/Session increased 12%
• Avg. Session Duration increased 10%
• Search page RPM: $15.88
• Adsense revenue: 64% increase

Case Study: nikonites.com
Nikonites also did well and saw better numbers with See More Google Custom Search installed.

• Bounce Rate decreased by 2%
• Search page RPM: $9.39
• Adsense revenue: 23% increase

Review: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....2&postcount=89
Review 2: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....1&postcount=86

Results will vary depending on site traffic and subject matter.

Installation

Google Custom Search Setup

1. First, you'll need to set things up with Google Custom Search if you haven't already. We are already assuming you have a Google Adsense account setup and it is linked with Custom Search
2. Go to https://www.google.com/cse/create/new
3. Enter all information and click Create
4. Under "Edit search engine" go to "Look and feel"
5. Click "Full width" and click Save
6. Go to "Setup"
7. Click the "Make money" tab, and make sure "Search Engine Monetization" is on and your AdSense account is hooked up
8. On the "Basics" tab under the Details section click - "Search engine ID"
9. Take note of your Search Engine ID

See More install & setup

1. Once you download the package, unzip it
2. Upload gsearch.php to your forum root
3. Install the product xml under the admincp. Plugins & Projects > Manage Products > Add/Import Product (at the bottom)
4. Go to Settings > Options > "See More" Google Custom Search
5. Insert your pub id as noted in the last step of the previous section
6. If you wish to change how the results page looks the template is named see_more_gsearch
7. That's it!

Release Log

• 6/18/14 - 1.0 - Initial Release
• 6/20/14 - 1.0.1 - corrected issue with Google ID verification
• 6/28/14 - 1.2.1 - Added option to display popular queries on search results page & choose the period of time they are from ? Caching of search page template ? Fixed validation error with Google Search ID - Fixed an issue where links were not appearing for some setups ? Removed search page centering ? Added support for different character encoding.
• 7/24/14 - 1.2.2 - Fixed character encoding issue - Added Who's Online location
• 9/16/13 - 1.2.3 - Fixed another character encoding issue - Added mobile style support

The lite version adds a link to ForumSetup.net to the footer of the search results page and thread pages. The pro version does not have this and adds some other features. To learn more, please see this page.

[fai99al99]

OK I found a solution to make it work.
I just replaced urlencode with utf8_encode and everything is fine now on my site.

didnt work for Arabic titles, return letters like this "??? ?? ????? ????? ??".

Iam not a coder, but I tried to add a function to convert text from windows-1256 to UTF8 and it worked.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by fai99al99

didnt work for Arabic titles, return letters like this "??? ?? ????? ????? ??".

Iam not a coder, but I tried to add a function to convert text from windows-1256 to UTF8 and it worked.

That also makes sense since utf8_encode only handles ISO-8859-1.

I've made it so this version handles every form of character encoding and just makes them all utf-8 for simplicity. It'll also handle characters that shouldn't be in a URL. Google seems to be very picky about what comes after the q=

For those of you that were having issues, please let me know if this works and I'll update the product. Unfortunately I have no easy way to test this if you couldn't tell.

[fai99al99]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

That also makes sense since utf8_encode only handles ISO-8859-1.

I've made it so this version handles every form of character encoding and just makes them all utf-8 for simplicity. It'll also handle characters that shouldn't be in a URL. Google seems to be very picky about what comes after the q=

For those of you that were having issues, please let me know if this works and I'll update the product. Unfortunately I have no easy way to test this if you couldn't tell.

works great :up:

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by fai99al99

works great :up:

Awesome!

[tpearl5]

fyi, anyone looking to get this working on the mobile style, you just need to create new template under the mobile style, name is "see_more_gsearch", and copy the contents of the template with the same name in your main style into it. Google automatically adjusts things for smaller screens.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

fyi, anyone looking to get this working on the mobile style, you just need to create new template under the mobile style, name is "see_more_gsearch", and copy the contents of the template with the same name in your main style into it. Google automatically adjusts things for smaller screens.

and, I'll include this in the next release...

[rememusa]

Hi all,

I need help with the plugin above. I installed the plugin on my site following the instructions but it did not work for me.

I cant see the ads and I cannot see the Google Search bar.

I followed all the instructions as I was told to do so.

One stupid question Do I need to have the Vbulleting integration with Google adsense in order to this plugin to work?

I dont have that option integrated between both plataform.

Another thing is my forum site is in Portuguese, I am not sure if it affects anything because of the language.

Thank you!

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by rememusa

Hi all,

I need help with the plugin above. I installed the plugin on my site following the instructions but it did not work for me.

I cant see the ads and I cannot see the Google Search bar.

I followed all the instructions as I was told to do so.

One stupid question Do I need to have the Vbulleting integration with Google adsense in order to this plugin to work?

I dont have that option integrated between both plataform.

Another thing is my forum site is in Portuguese, I am not sure if it affects anything because of the language.

Thank you!

try the product file in this post: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=122

what happens when you go to yoursite.com/gsearch.php? Make sure that you followed the instructions exactly for the CSE setup and that you have your settings set correctly.

No, you don't need the adsense integration - no one does. haha

[rememusa]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

try the product file in this post: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=122

what happens when you go to yoursite.com/gsearch.php? Make sure that you followed the instructions exactly for the CSE setup and that you have your settings set correctly.

No, you don't need the adsense integration - no one does. haha

I tried the file and still not working. When I go to mysite.com/forum/gsearch.php? it send me to another page without showing any results or messages, plain page.

thank you

[rememusa]

Originally Posted by rememusa

I tried the file and still not working. When I go to mysite.com/forum/gsearch.php? it send me to another page without showing any results or messages, plain page.

thank you

I do have this error message on setup my account

Error:
You did not enter a valid value for this setting.