Low Impressions on the Content Network ?
One of the most common asked questions when people advertise with Adwords on the Google Content Network is:
“Why are my content impressions so low?”
… and“How can I get more impressions on the Google Content Network?”.
Let’s see why this can happen …
There are some obvious and some not so obvious reasons. I found out that there is a very special reason why this can happen. I think it is the most common reason for low impression share especially for affiliate marketers. It has nothing to do with how high you bid or how good the CTR (Click Through Rate) on your ads is.
The more obvious resons for low impressions are:
Ads are not yet approved. You can see it in the “pending review” status
Keywords used are to narrow. This can happen if you simply select to many and specific keywords. Google might not find enough matches for your keyword-theme in the content network.
Too much negative keywords. If you select for instance the same hundreds of negative keywords that make sense on search, you might exclude too much content, because one of the many negatives are on the same page as all the keyword phrases that you want to target. Content does not work like search, where you have to get the exact query of the user matched to your offer. In fact on content there is no query; the user hasn’t entered one, he usually is just browsing the net. So less negative keywords, or even no negative keywords (use site-exclusions instead) works better.
I only exclude very obvious negative keywords like “scam” or such that totally disqualify for your offer: if a keyword can have different meaning, like “windows cleaner” could be for the Microsoft-Windows or for actual cleaning of windows. So if you would have a room cleaning-service you might consider “windows xp” as a negative in content as well (If you wanna digg deeper, here is a great post on negative keywords on AdWords).
Bids too low and too much competition. If you try to advertise on keywords that have a very high competition like for instance “forex trading” there might be so many running content campaigns already, that you have to bid higher to get any share of the impressions.
Bad history in the content network. You get penalized if your account history is bad. Nothing new here. If it’s the case and you made a lot of content campaigns that really were badly structured, not relevant and had bad CTR etc. (happens to newbie-accounts a lot), you might want consider creating a brand new Adwords account and cancel the old one, making it better this time.
No relevance. This obviously leads to a low quality score, similar to search campaigns. If your keywords are not relevant with your text on the landing page.
Really Bad CTR. Although it is common knowledge that CTR of a content campaign is not as nearly as important as in search, I think if you have a low CTR (0,1% and lower) on your ads, Google will prefer other campaigns. I personally saw campaigns with high CTR (and making everything else right) really take off on the content network. It would be extremely irrational if it would be otherwise. If you think about it, Google makes money if users click on ads, so it will prefer ads with higher CTR. Also on a side note: a high CTR gets you a low CPC!
Change in the available inventory. The content network means AdSense on publishers websites who control their inventory totally. So if they have sold better campaigns directly or simply decide to narror their inventory for AdSense, this has an impact on running content campaigns. They can also filter campaigns and say “I don’t want to see this campaign on my site.”
So especially if you run placement campaigns on content, this may alter your volume of impressions dramatically up to the point where traffic from a certain site vanishes completely.
Those are all more or less obvious reasons and even if you bid very high (like $2 per Click and above) and have relevant keywords and a good CTR (like 0.5% and more) it still can happen that Google is not giving you any more impressions. I found out there is one special reason for this:
There is a Quality Score on the Content Network
Yes, there is a quality score for your content campaigns (see also Google’s QS Guidelines).
If you bid high, have relevant keywords and everything else should work out, the one reason for low impressions may be a bad quality score. Especially for affiliate marketers the main reason for low impressions in the content network may be due to a low quality score of the content campaign. This means especially the landing page.
Here is the problem: you can’t see the quality score of the content campaign!
Unlike any search campaign, where the quality score is shown for every keyword, on content there is no display of the quality score in the Adwords interface. I recently talked to my Google Rep about this and Google confirmed that the landing page quality score of one of my campaigns is low and also that I can’t see it myself:
“Our system has crawled the sites for these campaigns and deemed the landing pages in question to have low quality scores. Your landing page quality needs to be improved if you’d like to increase your Quality Scores, lower your costs and increase your exposure on the content network.
Let me explain why we incorporate landing page quality into Quality Score: Our market research shows that low quality sites lead to a poor user experience, and unhappy users are less likely to click AdWords ads. High quality sites lead to better user experience and a higher return on investment for advertisers.“
After asking where the landing page quality score can be reviewed:
“Unfortunately, it is not possible to view this information within your Adwords interface. Due to the dynamic and automated nature of the way our system crawls your sites, we cannot provide you with any more information on the quality score of your sites at present. This information would not be present in the ads diagnostic tool for your keywords.”
Obviously that’s a flaw in the current Adwords system and a reason for much frustration among advertisers. Hopefully it will get corrected in future updates, since all of the latest updates were all very impressive, especially for content network advertising.
It is interesting that you can see an initial quality score for content campaigns in the AdWords Editor, which is similar to search campaigns. But I’m not sure if this quality score is up to date and relevant at all to the content network. I would doubt it, considering the results from content campaigns showing 7-10/10 keywords quality scores in Adwords Editor … and still getting very low impressions. I think it’s more like a single content network quality score, which is highly influenced by the landing page.
So what can you do?
I have found that landing page quality is most important for content campaigns.
Of course there may always be a slap of your campaign and it stops, the same as in search. You don’t see a single impression then, which is a clear sign. As long as you see impressions, it is not slapped. You can make sure if you check the quality score of a keyword in a search campaign for that domain. If it is 1/10 the domain is slapped and won’t work on search or content.
But a slap aside, I think in order to have a great landing page for the content network, you need a very keyword-relevant content-rich, especially text-rich landing page. I find that I get significantly more traffic to content network campaigns where the landing page has a lot for actual and relevant text on it. One page landers, possibly even with graphics instead of text are really bad content network landing pages.
So create a content rich landing page with lot’s of relevant text.
Another thing that might help is to consult with your Google Rep and try to improve your landing page. As always do it politely and in a cooperative manner and you can expect some actual useful help!
So that was my insight into how to increase impressions on the content network. If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. You can also always post in the forum.
Hopefullly Google will integrate the Content Network quality score into the interface soon.
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Hey Thumoney,
I just got banned from facebook this week for bullshit reasons that they won’t tell me (wasnt doing rebills or anything shady) so I am having to branch out now to other ppc sources. A lot of what I’ve read from people says to do simple landing pages and polls with email submits to get good at adwords and yahoo.
However, it seems now in this day and age that both google and yahoo hate these LPs and they slap them to shit all the time. I had a poll last fr 1 hour today on Yahoo before it was slapped.
If this is the case now, what would be a good type of offer to start off with for someone trying to break into YSM and google and profit? I can build blogs and all of that, I just need help with selecting CPA offers that would be good for a newbie to start promoting.
Thanks
Hey Jeff, yes short landers with polls etc, don’t really work anymore as a good PPC lander, especially not on Google. To break into PPC niches takes a bit of effort and time now. But it pays off and it can be fun as you learn it as well, and eventually seeing the rewards.
Also Google takes a lead to avoid shady offers (free* trials) more and more. And even as it cuts into my profits, honestly I’m happy that they do. It makes you to believe in the good side of things … ;)
In your case I would suggest to put some time into selecting an offer where you have the feeling you can make it work. I would not take a rebill, because that sets you up to future problems which you cannot avoid. To give you an idea, there is an offer on CPA networks to stop snoring which is sold directly. It’s a pretty huge market, people want to solve a problem and you can advertise easily for it. Something like that. There are a lot of others as well if you look hard enough.
You could build a good landingpage, which would be a small site (mask your affiliate links), or even use a direct link.
Then dedicate yourself to make this campaign work and focus on it. This is key because you have to go to a deeper level of understanding in order to be ahead of the crowd. Split test ads, make tight adgroups and be unltra-relevant and really know the system inside out. If you master one campaign and make it work on a high level, meaning being consistently in the top 3 positions on the most related money-keyword(s), which good quality scores and CTR, you’ll learn a lot. And then you can replicate it later.
Would you mind to share bidding strategy on content network? I guess the low traffic volume can be connected with wrong bidding strategy at start of campaign. Some people say to bid high at start and then gradually decrease bid, some suggest to bid low from start, though it doesnt bring any traffic in most cases.
I would like to know if you have any tactics which works most of the time how to get google noticed you are there and dont break your campaign from first day. I would like to hear something particular finally, as not many people are sharing it and you can read only general bs all the time. Your posts are really helpful and I guess you could put light on this also.
Goodwill, I personally usually bid pretty high when I start a campaign. That way I can speed up the optimizing process and see quickly which sites convert and which don’t. If you are on a very tight budget – and especially since you can really blow out volume on the content network, so use at least a budget! – that approach can be difficult to start with.
In the statistics you can see the cpc prizes you had to pay and the position you are in. You can adjust your cpc-bids accordingly then. What you want to achieve is a high CTR and therefore a low CPC-price.
I’m not saying that bidding low in the beginning can’t work, but I guess it will take more time to get the campaign to the optimum level. But it could save some money.
That being said, I found the in my campaigns, that the bid-price is usually not the limiting factor. I think it was often more the CTR or the landing page quality that Google determined.