The Google Content Network is a nice place, yet again
Every now and then I like to run a check-up on my contextual match content network campaigns, to make sure Google is doing it’s job in keeping Adsense partners in check. I’m happy to report that recent screening and higher scrutiny has gone a long way to clean up the Google Adwords Content Network. The whole point of contextual match campaigns is to find areas advertisers can generate impressions, and hopefully cheap clicks.
The problem, as it were
Quite a while ago, I wrote about how advertisers can make the most of their spend, and thankfully many of those content network tips hold true today. In the past, advertisers would see a lot of invalid clicks from content network campaigns show up in Adwords reports, which is somewhat disappointing. Problems including the following were pretty common:
- Clicks greater than impressions
- Duplicate Content Network domains/URLs showing up multiple times in a report, with extremely high click through rates
- Parked domains, error pages, and MFA (made for Adsense) sites, and few REAL sites
- Placements that were hit or miss
- Infrequent placements that were relevant
Despite all the problems the content network suffered from, return on ad spend (ROAS) was always pretty high. The problems could be solved with a quick call to an advertiser’s account rep at Google, they’re pretty good at awarding click credits if you have the proof. And it was certainly worth it to prove poor click quality. The real problem, as I saw it, was getting more impressions, and more traffic to drive revenue and order/lead volume higher and higher.
Several solutions make the ad network
There are a ton of solutions that Google has provided in the past year, which is why I feel I need to rehash this topic, and bring everyone up to speed. First and foremost, it seems Google has done a great job in integrating/recruiting many DoubleClick properties into Google Adsense. A natural synergy resulting from their takeover of DoubleClick not too long ago.
They’ve also made their contextual matching algorithm more sophisticated. I have seen substantially better results from much less optimized keyword lists that assist the matching algo for content network campaigns. Kudos to the Google Engineers for reducing workload on advertisers.
Targeting options have also increased in complexity. Aside from new tools such as Google Ad Planner, demographics targeting, and seemingly better geographical filters, they also seem to be better and quicker at matching targeted keywords to breaking stories on top media sites. Advertisers can get lucky a lot more often than ever before if a story breaks on a big site such as Bloomberg or CNN, for instance.
They haven’t quite figured out some kind of traffic or exposure normalizing algorithm just yet though, as evidenced by a few test campaigns set for very high daily budgets, but very low maximum cost per click. BTW: A great strategy to test on your own contextual match campaigns on the content network. Obviously, much easier to be successful and generate big numbers on top (revenue) when the numbers on bottom (cost) are small.
So, good work Google . I hope to be back to my complaining ways again in the near future, as changes are made to grow the network. It looks like innovation and short-term failure does in fact result in long-term success.
