Using the Content Network without Getting Used

Here in the office we tend to fall in and out of love with the Content Network. Over the last couple of years it has gotten progressively better for the advertiser. It used to be downright awful for most people, but the advent of things like the placement report has given us much more control over where on the internet your ad is served. The Content Network can be a powerful generator of traffic and leads, but it is still capable of amazing amounts of waste if you do it wrong. Like everything in Adwords, there is an ignorance tax to be paid if you don't know the right way to deal with the system. Here are some tips on how to use the Content Network without getting used.

First things first - Do NOT mix content and search in the same campaign!!! They don't work the same way and they need to be managed separately. Plus the value of Content and Search traffic is not equal and should be budgeted separately as well. While we are talking about budgets and money, start your bids much lower in content than you would in search. In most accounts an appropriate content bid is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of what you would pay in search. Obviously there are exceptions, but this rings true for the majority of accounts. Oftentimes when we take over existing accounts we discover that Content has been eating up a disproportionate amount of the daily budget and no one had any idea. If you're going to do content, set up a new campaign for only content traffic and turn off search in that campaign.

Just because you can't track which keyword is generating a view doesn't mean you should just toss all your Content keywords into a bucket. Group your keywords into themes. Google takes a more holistic approach to serving Content ads. They're looking at how relevant your ad group is to the content they're trying to match. Content ad groups don't need to be quite as laser focused as Search, but you should take similar care when creating them.

While doing keyword research for Content, be bolder in your keyword selections. Things you could never get away with in search could be good for content. For example if you sell Nike running shoes you would never want to bid on the word running by itself. There would be way too many off topic searches, your CTR would be awful, and it would negatively impact your Quality Score. In the Content Network you want this word because it's relative to what your target audience is reading about. A site dedicated to running or an article about a marathon is ideal real estate for your ad, a search query for running is not.

Run placement reports on a regular basis, this is a big deal! This is the only way to really know where your money is going, and individual sites have a tendency to surreptitiously run away with a big pile of your money. This is a good place to catch fraud or just sites that you don't want your ad served on. Typically Google will catch most major fraudulent action, but we've managed to retrieve large sums of money for clients based on what we've found in placement reports.

A couple of years ago we'd advise most people to skip the Content Network, it wasn't a very nice neighborhood. There was value in there but, it was difficult to get to. These days we are much more likely to utilize Content because it is much more controllable. The tracking and targeting has improved dramatically. It's still a dangerous place however. Be smart and careful with where and how you spend your money and you'll find the Content Network to be worth the effort.

Is it time to revisit the Content Network?

The Content Network isn't always the best neighborhood to play in. It isn't uncommon for novice Adwords advertisers to not even realize that they're getting a huge percentage of their traffic from the Content Network until they look down and notice their watch is missing and their wallet is empty. Not to say that the Content Network can't convert, it just has to be handled as a separate entity from regular Search.


As most people, know we have not been fans of the content network and for good reason. We had several new clients that came to us because of the damage that was being done by the content network. While we appreciated the business that this brought to us, we can think of much better ways to gain a client. Several clients saved thousands of dollars each month simply by turning off the Content Network with little impact on their revenue. There were conversions in the Content Network but the decision was either turn it off or try to guess where the abuse was coming from. Our decision was to turn it off if it did not meet the conversion cost goals of the client. We knew we were leaving potential conversions on the table but we also knew it was better for our client to not make those conversions.

Then in June 2007 Google responded to market pressure by releasing the "Placement Report" and professionals in the field immediately went to work using this new tool. The Placement Report allowed for the first time the ability to see where the traffic was coming from by using the site exclusion tool we could finally manage this traffic. In the first several months of the release of this we used this report to isolate and document some horrible things that were going on but we were not recommending a return to the content network for clients that had problems.

Our friends at Google are masters at the art of partial information and they did not disappoint us with this report. It tracks many clicks back to the specific URL your ad showed on but it also contains entries like "Domain Name" and "Error Pages," and these are largely unmanageable. We find it interesting that these common entries are missing from the examples and documentation but this just comes with the territory. There is a substantial delay between the time the data is reported in Adwords and when it is available to this report so you have to wait for your data.

Because of this new information we have slowly begun to revisit the content network, especially for clients that lost a number of conversions when this was turned off in the account. Some clients lost lots of unprofitable conversions are showing some good early results but this has to be done slowly and carefully. The Content Network and the Search Network operate very differently and mixing the campaigns is a huge mistake. Bringing a content network campaign online is done differently than a search campaign.

If you would like to discuss how this might impact your Adwords strategy please contact us.

Myspace, Your Money

Everyone knows Myspace as the biggest social networking website around for the 15-30 year old crowd, but not everyone knows that it can also be a drain on your Adwords budget.

Myspace is free, and all of the sites that offer graphics and layouts for Myspace are free as well. So to make money they all rely on advertising and Adsense is their weapon of choice. Thanks to the huge amount of traffic and loose broad matching there's a good chance if you use the Content Network that you have graced the pages of Myspace. For some advertisers who advertise consumer products to a younger demographic this is great; for many others this is a big waste of money.

Up until just recently one had no way of knowing that social networking sites were eating up their ad budget. There was no reporting associated with where your ads were showing, it was either Search Network or Content Network. Recently Adwords finally released a report with very little fanfare to see where your Content Network traffic was coming from. A real eye opener for those that noticed.

Social media and other web site of little to no business value can swallow up hundreds to thousands of dollars from advertisers. We've talked to a few people running their own Adwords campaigns that had mystery spikes in spending and traffic but not sales. They had no idea where the money was going and why they weren't getting anything back in return. For some of them we've taken on their accounts and trimmed a big percentage of their ad spend and maintained or improved the number of sales or leads.

Remember when you're looking at you account not all traffic is created equal. Make sure you track your conversion so that you can make an informed decision on whether a word is worth it or not. Just because it sends you visitors, it doesn't mean you want it!