Taking Advantage of the Content Network
There has been a trend among savvy PPC analysts to avoid advertising on the content networks that are offered by various Search Engine ad platforms. The reason? They range from “there’s no control over where your ads go” to “it sucks up all my money and provides no return.”
There are some very easy “fixes” for most of what PPC advertisers feel is “wrong” with advertising on the content network. In fact, it’s almost embarrassing how easy these are. This is the first in a series of articles regarding why those reasons are old and worn out… why you should get on the content network intelligently and take advantage of what it can do.
One of the most overlooked bits of advice is to separate Content Network ad campaigns from Search Network ad campaigns — most PPC advertisers will eventually get around to this because of the budget differential. When you’re marketing in a high-priced market sector (where the words are really expensive) like “selling on ebay” or “work from home,” it’s only sensible to keep the budget for the more expensive search network ads separated from the less expensive content network ads. But there’s another, more pressing reason, related to advertising, for these two types of campaigns to be separated.
In a nutshell, these two networks contain different kinds of users. Think about it – someone who goes to Google and types in a keyword phrase that you are bidding on is already looking for your item. Your ad should be written with that in mind – you don’t need to be flashy with it, tricky with the wording, or too “cosmo” with the ad composition. The user is already there – all you need to do is provide an obvious benefit for their click up front. “Start earning money within 15 minutes with our system. Free Demo.” Simple benefits. There’s really little to no coercion involved when you know the user typed in “work from home.”
But when your ad is shown in Ad Sense blocks on blog sites or online magazine sites where you don’t know exactly what content on the page triggered your ad, you need to have a different approach to how you compose the word list, as well as the ads. Sure you can do this at the ad group level, but as time goes on, it’s easier to monitor performance and tweak the keyword list if these two networks are kept separate at the campaign level. Then you can see at a glance what your conversion rates are for each kind of network. It’s also easier to manage the spend, especially if you advertise with terms that have tremendous search volume. It’s really easy for the content network to eat a budget and not leave any for the search network, especially if your ads are written to appeal to a broader content network market.
When you approach it intelligently, you can make the content networks for all the major search engines work for you – after all, Google wouldn’t bother offering it if it wasn’t worthwhile.
Contributed by the editor of Intelligent PPC
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