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This may have slipped underneath many people’s radars recently, but you can now bid CPC for Google placements on the content network. Let me repeat that, you can now bid CPC for placements on the content network! To me, this is one of the biggest developments with Adwords in the last year. It totally re-writes the playbook of how to use the content network. Rather than using the rifle approach, where you have to narrowly target certain sites after randomly finding them with keyword campaigns, you can use the shotgun approach, and blast your ad everywhere to see what sticks. You can essentially use Google’s content network like you would Adbrite’s. With the old CPM model it was necessary to carefully choose the site’s you targeted, which made finding high converting sites difficult and time consuming. But with CPC bidding, you can be far more loose with sites you choose to target.
Not only do you have all these advantages, but you can have a placement campaign up and running in 5 minutes with almost no research time. Write a couple ads, select your placements, and your good to go. Using one of the 4 targeting options they provide, you can quickly generate a huge list of sites to run your ad on. The more offers you can quickly prospect, the better chances you will hit on something. Then you can further expand the offer with a keyword targeted campaign or other techniques. Now you can see why I find this so important.
Does it work? Yes! I have been rocking placements for all they are worth ever since the CPC bids came out a few weeks ago. I was tempted to not blog about it, but big G’s content network is big enough where there is room for all of us. So jump in and give it a try. If you want to know how to set up one of these campaigns , see this Adsense tip post I did last week which gives most of the steps. Have fun!
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I’ve been closely guarding this secret since it came out… enjoy!
I tried the new CPC bidding model in Placement Targeting and found it to be just as expensive as the CPM model. The Content Network still offers a far better reach with more sites to show your ads that are not available via Placement Targeting.
I had heard not to use the content network at all. I guess I should give it a shot.
Hmm, interesting that you think this is a big deal. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve been super successful just setting up keyword targeted campaigns on the content network, tracking everything, and just blocking all the domains that send traffic that doesn’t convert. What’s the big deal with placement targeted, especially if you aren’t spending any time researching/checking out the proposed sites? How is this really any different from simply setting up a keyword targeted campaign??
If you know that non-targeted traffic always converts at a certain CR, then you essentially blanket every site you can find at $.xx CPC. This takes all the risk out of the old CPM style.
@Patrick - The main advantage over the traditional way you are describing is speed of setup. Instead of researching and building a keyword list, splitting out the adgroups, writing targeted ads for each, etc. - You can write a couple of ads and blast them out to the content net by placement in about 5 minutes. Plus you can target in ways that you just can’t do with KWs which may help you find a site that never would have popped up using KW method.
@Tob - Exactly!
I just launched two different campaigns @ $.30 on the placement targetting CPC network. I only had 11 clicks, 40,000 impressions yesterday. Today it stopped to nothing. I launched the same campaign on my other adwords account, it is repeating what happened yesterday. Any thoughts? Do I need to increase my CPC?
@Brady - I would give it a few more days and hold strong on your bids. From my testing I get very little traffic the first few days, then it takes off like a rocket….
I agree with chad on some points. One it is a better deal for us advertisers with less work… BUT dont think its a quick easy ride it takes some fine tuning just like any other campaign.
Chad. Thanks for the tip. I love learning from those that have a bit more experience. Love the site by the way. Always enjoy when you’ve got a good new quality post.
I know most people use a landing page, but if you are direct linking to the merchant can they see what content site you are targeting?
Should I be using redirects at all times so the merchant doesn’t cut me out by out bidding me and placing their own ads on the site?
[…] wrote about before, and I am still bullish on placement targeted campaigns on the Google content network. If you haven’t been keeping up on the placement world, you can […]
Advantages?
If you launch a placement-only targeted campaign, then you can “run of site” your campaign. So you can run your wine.com advertisement on all pages of lexusfanatics.com. With traditional KW targeting, or with the hybrid KW + Placement targeting, you would never show.
So the big bonus is access to more traffic, targeted by placement rather than context.
If you want the contextual targeting too, then launch a hybrid account with placements on top of KW. This will _restrict_ your possible impressions to contextual targeting from the keywords AND only the placements you specify. So, in the above example, you would NOT show on lexus driving articles, but you might show on a Lexus tour of napa wine country article page.
Hope that helps. Enjoy!