Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Content match provides an excellent opportunity for corporate branding, or the creation and dissemination of a corporate identity. Content match enables advertisers to realize tremendous exposure at an affordable cost, but also presents potential hazards if not properly setup, monitored & modified.

Today, I reviewed one account that I am familiar with to provide a specific example of Content Match’s potential reach; I’ll refer to this as Client X. I am going to refer specifically to Google AdWords results for this example.

In the past 2 weeks, Client X received a total of more than 2 million impressions via Content Match compared to just over 100,000 search impressions. The 2 million content generated impressions resulted in 529 clicks, costing about $300 or $0.17 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Of those 2 million+ impressions, 1.5 million were contextual and 500,000 were image ads. Client X does have conversion tracking in place and Content Match provided conversions at a cost in line or lower than the cost-per-conversion associated with search.

Though content match exposure is less targeted than search generated traffic, it certainly represents a great way to reach out to an enormous audience that can increasingly be better targeted. Google is improving this all the time. Client X will receive over 4 million page impressions this month thanks to Content Match. Numbers like that represent a substantial base of potential customers for any business. However, Content match success does not come without challenges.

Content Match requires a unique setup, lower bids to start and ongoing monitoring to check the websites carrying your ads. At this stage in the game, reviewing the content providers is still incredibly important. I was able to use Client X’s analytics data to identify a handful of websites where this client’s ads should not have been running, and then used Google’s Site Exclusion Tools to block those websites. This step is critical. There are still some questionable content partners who need to be monitored. In the end, Content Match can be quite powerful, but use caution or consider professional PPC Management.

In my final post about the new features in Google AdWords Editor, I’d like to review the new Placement targeted campaign options.

Google is really spending some time and energy on improving content network targeting as you may have read in my post about the enhanced campaign feature they enabled a couple of weeks ago.

We are starting to see some good results with our campaigns that combine the regular keyword targeting content campaign with the ability to designate exactly which sites our ads are placed on.

Now, within AdWords Editor we are able to add site placements at the Ad Group level. I still go to AdWords Online to begin the process of site placement because they will give you a really nice list of sites to choose from based on either keywords or other URLs. However, what I find the AdWords Editor feature useful for is copying a list of site placements into multiple Ad Groups.

It is also very useful if you are entering site placements using a placement report. Run a placement report from a recent keyword targeted content campaign, export it to an XLS file, create a list of sites that are working for your campaign and copy those into the Placements tab. Very streamlined!

Additionally, if you are working with a traditional keyword targeted content campaign, you can now add negative sites at the ad group level.

Once again, anything Google adds to the AdWords Editor that streamlines our process and allows us to get more work done remotely just adds time to our day!

If you’d like more information or training on using Ad Words Editor, check out this release announcement from Google.

Using Placement Targeting in your Google AdWords campaigns can add a huge boost to your content network placement results.

In one of my previous posts on Content Network Targeting, I showed you how to use the Placement report to understand where your ads are being placed on the content network and which placements are working the best for you.

In addition to using their site exclusion tool to exclude sites from showing your ads, you can also use Google’s Placement Targeting to specifically place your ads on the sites that are working for you.

And just last week Google added the ability to combine placement targeting and keyword targeting (or contextual targeting) so you can request your ads be placed on a specific site but only when their content matches your keywords.

Placement Targeting + Contextual Targeting = Highly Targeted Traffic!

For example, maybe you know that a specific travel site frequently posts articles about traveling to the Caribbean.  You would like to place your ads for your Beautiful Caribbean Resort on their site but only when it is relevant to the article they have written.  You certainly don’t need your ad showing up when they write an article on vacationing in Ireland – what a waste!

Well, now you can do both!  Bid to place your ad on that site specifically but ONLY when the content matches your keyword selections.

As Google allows us to get more and more specific as to where our ads are placed within the content network, our clients at  are now growing much more successful with their content campaigns.