Posted by Scott Clark @ 8:53 am
Google Adwords Keyword Placements: Squeezing Performance Out of the Content Network.
Filed under: Optimization
Jul
21
2008
21
2008
With the new Keywords + Placements feature you do not have to create seperate campaigns for keyword and placement-targeted campaigns. In each Ad-group, you now have tabs for each content network method… cool!
This will let you isolate areas of weak or strong performance. So if you’re targeting a home improvement portal with your placements, but you only sell plumbing supplies, you can more accurately limit ad display to pages with plumbing items.
When you choose to run your ads anywhere on the content network, AdWords compares your keywords to available ad placements to find good matches for your ad. (If you have the keyword digital cameras, your ad is likely to appear next to content about digital cameras.) When you choose ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target,’ your ad can show only on the places within the content network that you select yourself.
We should be able to see better stats now on reports, and also be able to tweak bidding based on the quality of a placement-keyword ad’s performance.
So… what’s improved:
1. precision in targeting by adding a “dial” for keywords used in placement ads. You don’t have to appear on irrelevant pages in a given placement when it is not matched to your keyphrases.
2. bidding control - adjust bids to suit the quality of the placement
3. bidding CPM with keywords, not just placements. So you can do either or both.
4. Ability to do better testing with placements. Even though I’m going to approach this carefully, it gives us the chance to split test and multivariate test performance of keyword-specific ads in the content network. This could help with reducing the time necessary to get statistical significance on the sample size
How it works
Keywords are scanned and then Google will scan the content network and find all matches for a given keywords. Your settings determine what happens next. Either it will kick in the whole contextual network or it will use your placements list, and filter it based on your keyword choices.
AdWords also takes keyword matching down to the page level. If a placement has many different pages, only those pages that match your keywords can show your ads. For instance, suppose placement A is a website about flowers, with 100 different pages: five about red roses, and 95 about other flower varieties. AdWords may identify only those five pages about red roses as a good match for your keyword. Your ad won’t appear on the other 95 pages of A, even though you’ve targeted the entire website, if those pages aren’t a good match for your keywords.
What I expect
In addition to saving time on campaign creation, this should help clickthrough rates (CTRs) and performance of campaigns on adsense properties which have general content on most of the site, but have an area of interest to you that has specific content.
I have some campaigns right now that will benefit…Looking forward to using it!
Venn Diagram photo by Lisa Williams used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License
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23
2008
[...] Clark has a great summary of the recent Google Adwords changes and is the perfect place to get up to speed while Darin.cc comments in particular on Google’s [...]