**by Matt Lawson**
If a single ad network could help you reach 80% of global Internet
users—and target them based on geography, website and even
context—you would probably invest a lot of time figuring out how to
optimize your advertising dollars there. Yet, for many large
advertisers, the opportunity of advertising on Googles AdSense
content network hasn't been fully realized.
Advertisers often start with the wrong approach to the content
network altogether. As a result, they find the return on their
investment to be sub-par. The most typical mistake we see is when
search marketers simply run their search network campaigns on the
content network. While this approach may save some setup time, it more
or less ensures your content network campaigns will be poor
performers—because the two networks are inherently different, so
your ad campaigns for both must be, too.
However, even when advertisers follow best practices and organize
their content and search campaigns separately, they still find the
content network difficult to measure and manage. With your ads being
distributed across thousands of sites, it's hard to ensure they are
being displayed on websites that deliver high quality and relevant
audiences. At the heart of this problem lie two challenges:
measurement and scale.
You can't manage what you can't measure and many advertisers don't
have visibility into how their content network campaigns perform at a
granular level, such as by site or placement. Addressing this problem
requires implementing a robust analytics package that manages the
process of integrating click and cost data from Google with conversion
data from your site—so you can understand the performance of your
placements on the basis of revenues, profit-per-impression and return
on investment.
Once you have the tools you need to perform accurate measurement, you
also need to find a way to manage campaigns across thousands of
potential placements. Technology can be part of the solution here.
Using an analytical system that is flexible enough to allow for
management by exception—enabling you to search, filter and sort in
an iterative fashion—is crucial. But even more critical, is how you
go about managing your overall content network programs. By applying
some simple best practices to your marketing efforts, you may be
surprised to find that your ROI on the content network can often be
higher than your ROI on the search network.
Here are four best practices to keep in mind:
Create themes, not lists
Advertising excellence on the search network requires building
exhaustive lists of keywords, using phrase and exact matches and
attempting to account for every variation, plural or misspelling of a
term that a user might type into Google. The content network is
different. Google seeks to match the keywords you choose with thematic
content on a web page.
As a result, your goals for creating keywords on the content network
should take this into account. Organize your ad groups into themes and
put together a small but closely related set of terms that target that
theme. Make your themes specific and try to include the most important
word for your theme in every keyword term. For example, if your theme
is Florida real estate, choose a set of keywords such as �sunny
florida real estate, �beautiful florida real estate, �luxury florida
real estate, etc. By anchoring your terms around a specific word, you
will help Google zero in on what you are after. Likewise, by modifying
your anchor term with a variety of adjectives, you will create keyword
terms that improve your quality scores for potential variants on that
anchor term.
Add placements as negatives to prune traffic
Once your campaigns have launched, you can begin to measure the
results and try to exclude irrelevant traffic. On the search network,
this process involves refining your match types and adding negative
keywords. On the content network, however, you have another, more
powerful option. By reviewing the performance of the sites where your
ads are being clicked on using a profit-per-impression metric, you can
quickly add negative placements to your campaigns. This not only
reduces your costs, but increases the click-through rates on your
campaigns, driving your resulting quality scores higher.
This type of refinement can be more powerful than using negative
keywords, because negative placements can easily be applied across all
of your content network campaigns. If you find that a particular site
doesn't resonate with your target audience for one product, it's
likely that it won't resonate for others as well. Because there are no
limits to the number of negative placements you can use, pruning over
time allows you to increase ROI—not only for your existing
campaigns, but also for campaigns that you have yet to launch!
Create separate bids for winning placements
When you find a winning keyword on the search network, your best
option is to simply bid it up. With the content network, however, you
can do one better. Start by identifying which placements are most
effective for your keyword campaigns. Then create a separate campaign
targeting these high performing sites and placements only. You can
leave your keyword-targeted campaign in place, but bid more on your
placement-targeted campaign. Over time, you will be able to cherry
pick the placements that are most important to you and bid them
aggressively, while at the same time maintaining your existing keyword
campaigns to identify new high-value opportunities for
placement-specific targeting.
Test, measure, repeat
As with any search marketing methodology, you should treat this as a
process, not a single change or tactic. Investment in the process,
however, will pay dividends over time. As you build a robust list of
both negative and positive placements, you build an asset for
targeting your high-value customers and understanding where they spend
time on the internet. As you launch new keyword campaigns on the
content network for new product lines or offerings, your placement
list asset will allow you to rapidly generate ROI with a lower
investment of time and effort. And with an understanding of where your
customers are on the web, you can begin to target them through other
channels such as social media, display and sponsorships on these
sites.
I'd love to hear more about your experiences on the content network.
Leave a comment below about what has and hasn't worked for you.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Matt Lawson <http://searchengineland.com/author/matt-lawson/>
is director of marketing for Marin Software
<http://www.marinsoftware.com>
, bringing a breadth of online marketing, web analytics and search
experience to the company.
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