PPC-Advice.com

The Google Adwords Content Network is going to get interesting

A few days ago Google announced that it would start serving third party ads on North American sites serving Google Adsense (i.e. the Content Network). Our industry is well aware that the Content Network can be like the wild west, where heroes are few to none, and bad placements on sites are a dime a dozen. All cliche aside, the Content Network is about to get a bit more interesting.

I didn’t say bad, the news could’ve been worse…

The one caveat I find extremely interesting is that Google decided to limit 3rd party participation on the content network strictly to North American sites. This relieves the gigantic burden of having to deal with click quality issues with perennially notorious publishers overseas in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

Scraper sites, domain squatters, and just downright unsavory webmasters are relatively easy to spot in Placement reports, as their deviously high click through rates usually top 50% or more, as opposed to the much more common 1% CTR (at maximum) that real, quality content sites generate.

North American ad space is generally a much nicer playground than global content network placements, but there are probably other reasons Google opted to stay local. For one, analytics tracking in general is often less ambiguous and yields greater accuracy for North American sites and visitors. For instance, the average North American probably doesn’t know what a proxy is because governments don’t restrict internet access, unlike other countries where the web surfing population has become accustomed to getting around firewalls.

In this respect, Google has made an effort to curb poor click quality, but it’s in their best interest to accommodate their new media partners, not necessarily their advertisers.

Oh Google, why hast thou forsaken <insert your name here>?

Google, you know I love you, but I don’t see any value in this change from an advertiser’s perspective.

From my perspective as an advertiser and account manager, Google has taken an already turbulent real estate market in the Content Network and thrown a world of new competitors into the mix. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against competition in any way, but something should have been done to fix many problems advertisers face. Instead, Google’s gone and introduced a few new ones. Here’s why:

1. Third party networks will likely demand higher click quality on behalf of their own advertisers, making poor quality clicks a much bigger problem for Google to manage. Only a handful of advertisers know they can request click quality credits, agencies are in the loop but also own their own exclusion lists making it less of a problem, but ad distribution networks will request credits en masse!
2. Let’s say your company is enjoying relatively stable performance on the Content Network and a whole platoon of new advertisers flood the market. If you’ve finely tuned your Content Network bids, expect impression share to drop dramatically with the increased competition. You may see the same amount of impression share if your budget is already maxed out, but you’re likely going to have to…
3. Higher bids. Not only may you have to bid higher to get impressions, but you might have to bid significantly higher, because…
4. Ad distribution networks like serving image ads. I’d say the majority of content network placements are still text-only, however many are flexible in that they can accommodate both text or images. If an image ad is run, it can easily oust several text ads, making competing for impressions and clicks a much more difficult prospect.
5. Here’s Google, there’s Google, oh and here’s Google again. Not only do they own the Content Network through Google Adsense, they also own the ad distribution network with Google Adwords, and they also compete with their own advertisers and ad distribution network partners by inserting Google-branded product ads left, right, and center. Doesn’t that worry anyone?

Regardless of all the nay that I say, it was perhaps inevitable for Google to amass such a large ad distribution network without one day opening up the gates to new media partners. Good for them. Another bright light is this: with great distribution comes great responsibility. Perhaps the addition of 3rd party ad networks will give advertisers the leverage they need to get Google to clean up the Content Network. If so, I welcome the change with open arms.

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