Tips for Success on the Google Content Network
The Google AdWords Content Network can be a real mystery. There are still some things that let me wonder what is going on. For instance if I run a Content Network campaign for a week and suddenly it runs out of impressions, even though my ads, the sites I target and the CTR stays the same. In the beginning Google seems to test every content campaign and gives it initial impressions. Later the performance (CTR) and bidprice compared to the competition determines if a campaign keeps running or not.
In this post I want to give a solid overview to run a successful campaign on the Google Adwords Content Network …
The Mind-Set for the Content Network
The Content Network inside of Google AdWords is the advertisers side of the AdSense network for site publishers. If we start a campaign inside of AdWords we can select if we want to run ads on Search only or also on Content. Most of you users of AdWords know that it is crucial to separate the two right from the start into two different campaigns. The reason is first and foremost that the user on Search is actively looking for something while the user we reach on Content is “passively” seeing our ad. So he is in a completely different frame of mind and has a different intention if he sees the ad.
In that way advertising on the Content Network is much more like buying adspace on other websites, instead of PPC keyword advertising on the search engine: You place Text-Ads or Banner-Ads on targeted websites – a completely different ball game.
Keywords in the Content Network are not Keywords
Keywords work differently for a content campaign than they work for search. The basic idea is to create 10-40 related keywords for a content campaign. Those keywords will then be used as a theme to determine the pages where the ads should show on.
All keywords for a content campaign are broad match. There is no need to insert keywords that have exact or phrase match, since those will be ignored anyway.
There is also no need for separate keyword bids, since as mentioned above, Google uses the theme of keywords to determine where to show your ad. All keywords and clicks will have the same bid for one adgroup.
Also don’t go overboard with negative keywords. While it may ok to use some negative keywords like for instance “scams” or something other really disqualifying, don’t use the negatives you may use on search. For instance the negative “free” would prevent your ad from appearing on a website where somewhere on the site is the word free – usually not a good idea.
Targeting Sites with Placements
You can also target websites directly for your ads. If you use “Placements” you can say I want my ads to run on that specific website. Now you have two options: First you can also use keywords which means that Google will target those Placements but only show the ads if they also match your keywords. Secondly you can only use Placements without keywords which means that Google will show your ads on those sites on possibly all pages. So be careful with Placements only without keywords, because if you select CNN.com you may get a negative impression of the content network the next day, if you know what I mean ;)
Placements without keywords mostly make sense on smaller, very focused websites. An example would be a site about muscle building only, where you want to place an ad about an abs workout exercise.
The Ads on a Content Campaign
Text-ads on the Content Network, from my experience, should be somewhat more attention-grabbing. Having a text-ad somewhere on a text-loaded website is a different thing than having it on top or right to search results.
I really love image ads. You can also use animated flash ads which are even more effective if done right. Image ads take much more space on the website and attention from the user. You can also insert more information (with images + text) than in the text ad and therefore pre-sell the user much better.
The important formats are: 300×250, 160×600 and 728×90. Also to a lesser degree 336×280, 468×60, 120×600 and 250×250. If you want to target a specific website check which banners they use and also, very important, check in which areas of the site those are. A 728×90 (leaderboard) on the bottom won’t get a great CTR for your campaign.
A nice trick is to use text in an image ad. That way the ad may look like a giant text-ad or even as part of the website you are advertising on. This usually will improve your CTR and therefore your bid-price.
Here are two nice image ads on the popular TruthAboutAbs.com Offer from Clickbank:
The left one is from the original product owner made for affiliates. It pulled a nice CTR on one campaign I run of 1.51%. The right one is a similar format I made in a text-ad style which pulled a CTR of 2.87% which is really ace on the content network!
Another great benefit of using image ads is also that you are preparing yourself for media buying. If you have a campaign or an offer / product that really takes off and has a great ROI then doing a media buy might be the next level thing. And what could be better than having proven high CTR and converting image ads ready right from the Google Content Network?
Optimizing a Content Campaign
When I start a content campaign I make a really related keyword list and create also very related ads for it. I usually don’t start with placements – unless I already know some sites that I really want to target or that proved themselves already. Normally I let Google show me sites that work for my keyword theme.
Because after some days you can have a look at the placement report or display the sites that Google targeted based on your keywords and then optimize. You can select sites with a high CTR and with conversions (you are using the build in Google conversion tracking, right?!?) and put them into placements. You will also want to select the non-performers and put them in as negative sites (excluded). That way you can constantly optimize your content campaign and make sure you get a higher CTR and more Conversions.
Once you have found those sites that make you money you can also open a completely now adgroup for them and target a) possibly the whole site if it is not getting to broad and b) possibly start bidding by CPM instead of CPC. Bidding on CPM (per 1000 impressions) makes sense if your CTR is really high – do the math, it can be a great way to further improve your ROI.
In this campaign above you can see the Automatic placements and the Managed placements, which have a higher CTR (Click Trough Rate) of 1.88% vs. the 0.67% (by the way, both of those numbers are pretty good on the content network). Therefore the average CPC is 0.10 EUR on the managed placements. The campaign started with a CPC of 0.35 EUR and went down due to the good CTR.
Some Special Facts about the Content Network
You can’t really split test on the content network. Since the ad is a part of the targeting option that Google uses, if you use a very different ad Google would use different pages to show your ad on. Also it is not safe to say that your ads will even appear on the same page to be correctly tested against each other. On the contrary, that is very unlikely. Therefore it’s not a good idea to split-test ads on the Content Network the same way as on the Search Network.
Don’t pause content network campaigns. This fact was supported by Glen Livingston and it says if you pause a content campaign you basically say to Google please start over again and you lose your spot on the websites. On the Content Network Google is constantly pushing the ads into more sites using fuzzy logic to see, if the ads are working there. So if you stop this process, this might be a bad idea. What you could do instead is set your daily budget as low as $1/day or use ad-scheduling.
That was more of a basic article about advertising on the Content Network. I plan to go deeper in future posts.
Do you have any questions about the Content Network? What are your experiences or problems? Ask away with a comment, I will answer shortly …
Related posts:
Wow, a very informative and good article posted. Very thnx for sharing a nice info.
Hi Kerala, you’re welcome. If there are any questions please feel free to ask.
Thumoney,
Cool post man!
Do you use the same search campaign keywords? Or do you create new one?
How do you group the content network keywords?
I personally use completely different keywords for content, and I group them in different ways (trial and error) until I get decent volume of impressions and then work on CTR.
Best,
Leadicious
I select a theme of about 20-30 keywords, including the most obvious ones (the “main keywords”). Mostly they include a lot of keywords that worked on search. If I want to broaden the reach (for instance a health product on men-related websites) then I want to use different keywords, yep.
Another good way to find keywords for an adgroup is to use the “wonderwheel” on google.com search: It’s right below the search box to the left: click “Show options…” and in the left bar then “Wonder wheel” and you will get the most related keywords for a main keyword. That was a suggestion by a Google rep.
Of course the Content Network algorithm will try to find more websites that fit your theme. As far as I know it’s a kind of fuzzy logic that constantly tries to expand and match your campaign to websites, IF your campaign is working ok, which means has a good CTR.
I’m currently experimenting with adgroups of completely different keywords (but still related) for the same product. I will post the results on the site later …
So far it looks like you can get fastly different numbers of impressions with different keyword-groups. The question of course remains: what is working and what not. For instance for a men’s health product I use 3 groups: a) tight kewords for the product-category b) health related keywords and c) men related keywords. You want to optimize those adgroups 1 by 1 and keep a look at them of course. The goal would be to find converting websites that are very different to each other and focus on them with an own adgroup and ads on the Content Network.
It is really an impressive article. But i am still confused of my problem i.e
Whenever i tried to run content network campaign, it runs week or two and suddenly stops even my ctr and other things are too goood. I am monitoring the sites of low ctr and add them in exclusion palcement but this happens always.
My concerns are:
- My any website which is not appearing on content network, Is it useless now. or there is a way to appear this website again on content network by any tweek settings of adwrods.
- What is the exact procedure to avoid this problem.
Please help me , i will be greatful to you.
Hi Yasir, what you describe is one of the most common problems on the content network and I will dedicate my whole next post to it.
You say that your CTR is good, which would mean about 1% or at least 0.5% which should assure that you are shown on most niches. I guess your keywords are not too special and you don’t use negative keywords in excess.
Then the most likely reason for stopped impressions is a content slap. It seems to happen the same way as a search slap with the frustrating difference that you can’t see it in quality score. (A slapped campaign on search has a quality score of 1/10 on the active keywords)
If that’s the case it’s difficult to get the campaign going again. Try to get in contact with your Google Rep (use the contact form if you dont have a persons contact) and then ask POLITELY what the reason might be and what you could do to improve! (I sometimes see people yelling at Google Reps in their emails, you really want to avoid that! :))
I personally had also some success by pausing the campaign and activating it the next day again. I really don’t know what that was all about, but maybe you want to try it if all fails. The other options would be opening a new campaign with that domain and opening a new campaign with a new domain.
Feel free to report back and look out for my next post coming shortly…
Awesome article; so insightful! I run a very good Search Network (SN) campaign with a CTR ~10%. I also have the the Content Network (CN) enabled (by default). I never pay attention to it much, it the CTR is usually less than 1%, which brings my total CTR down. According to Google (http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115578), the Google Search Quality Score is not affected by the CN. However, you make an excellent argument for separating the Search and Content Networks into different campaigns that I have never even thought of!
I do lots of A/B testing and its very effective for search. However, you make a great point about why it doesn’t work for the CN. I’m so glad you pointed this out; I would have been trying to do split testing on the CN without realizing its ineffectiveness.
I have not read such a densely informative article on the subject in quite some time. Thank you. I’m off to my AdWords account to separate my search and content advertising!
P.S. What is the difference between subscribing to your Insider Newsletter and your RSS feed?
Hi Clint, thanks. The Newsletter will see some completely different articles. I started this site I think 1-2 month ago and still building it, while building up my affiliate markting volume too. But the idea is to create a great autoresponder list on the Newsletter and send some exclusive information over it, that won’t be on the site.
Now, seperate search and content right now in your campaigns. :) Seriously, it’s very helpful.
You are right, the Quality Score in search is not affected by Content. But if you run it and dont pay much attention to it, why even run it? Maybe you even lose money there and it drags you down. You have to pay real distinct attention to both, search and content.
Search is PPC Advertising.
While Content is really Contextual Media Buying.
Unbelivable article! :-)
Thumoney, it was awesome man!
Thanks a lot! Really cool stuff!
i am intrigued by your statement that split testing is ineffective on the content network.. it makes perfect sense. but if you can’t split test, how do you go about improving CTR?
Kathy, the statement is more or less a more technical one. If you look at the overall picture, you still can split test, but it’s not as precise as in search. If you want to make it 100% valid, you would have to select one single page and split test the ad only on that in the content network.
In general I think it’s still a good method to do the split-testing. You have to watch the site-specific stats closely though, and compare them, in order to not improve on the one site but come out worse on the second site.
Another way would be to open a new adgroup for a new ad, and do a “split test” that way. You could keep the placements that are good in the old adgroup and try to find new ones in the new adgroup.
All in all, from my epxerience, it’s still valid to do split testing, just be aware that it is different on content.
Hi Thumoney, great article, thanks!
Have you manged to work out how Google defines a theme?
The examples given in: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54591 show different approaches. For some adgroups (e.g. Spiderman Toys), the keywords comprise the title itself, synonyms of the title (e.g. spiderman figure) , and plurals of both the title and synonyms (e.g. spiderman figures). Whereas in other adgroups (e.g. Spiderman Clothes) the keywords are hyponyms of the title (e.g. spiderman t-shirt) , and plurals of the hyponyms (e.g. spiderman t-shirts).
So, which is the best way to go – synonyms or hyponyms? Also, it’s not clear whether to include mis-spellings in the group, or indeed any other semantic relations.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Damian.