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Clean up your Adwords Content Network Placements

Last year I blogged about the importance of excluding content network placements that resulted in abnormally high click through rates. I also blogged about how advertisers should be aware that certain political regions block access to many corporate sites. It took three months but the evidence is undeniable: exclude the bad, and usher in the good. What does that mean?

Simple…

It means that if you were to exclude all the subdomains of high-traffic sites with abnormally high click through rates and correspondingly low ROI, you’re likely to increase your advertising exposure on a greater percentage of high-quality placements. For example:

• Instead of paying some kid on MySpace.com with an Adsense account for 10 clicks on 10 impressions, block the little cretin at “myspace.com/littlewienerkid” and you’re likely to have a better chance of showing up on “myspace.com/superbowlads“.
• Instead of showing your ad on parked domains that are unlikely to convert much traffic, exclude those parked domains and get real placements on sites like CNN.com, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc.
• Instead of showing your ads in China, getting people to click on them, and realizing that your website is blocked by the Chinese Government, exclude China and any other region that may be blocking access to your site. Not sure? Ask Google, they can test that quite easily.

By carefully monitoring Google Adwords reports such as the Content Placement report, I have seen wildly unstable Content Network campaigns go from EKG-like biorhythms to steady and predictable week-over-week ROI. Since many web analytics programs cannot tell you much about placements (thanks to Google Syndication redirects), Google Adwords reports are your only hope in optimizing content network campaigns.

When optimizing Content Network campaigns, it’s best to remember the following rules of thumb:

• Content Placements are slow to change, some exclusions may not take effect for several days to a week, or longer.
• Quality placements are less likely to appear routinely, but ROI should level off and indicate profitable campaigns (in some cases 3 months later!).
• If visitors are less likely to click pay-per-click ads versus organic rankings on SERPs, they’re much less likely to click Content Network placements. High CTR on the Content Network is a good indicator of low-quality traffic.
• Impressions are likely to drop substantially as Google Adwords and Adsense talk to each other, but they’ll kiss and make up within a few weeks. Impressions on my test campaigns rebounded to pre-optimization levels within 6 weeks.
• Content Network campaigns can be chaotic if you’re staring new campaigns. Begin with a meager budget and scale up when campaigns show a predictable ROI pattern.

It’s interesting to note that Google has listened to advertisers in recent months, improving the quality of placements on the Content Network. If they continue to scale up their partnerships, the Content Network may be a viable standalone campaign option for advertisers just starting out.

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