Advice Needed -PPC campaign on the Google Content Network

[henrow]

If someone can give me any input on my campaign. I know its only 1 ½ days of data, but I had to pause it because I realized that I have know idea if the Affiliate Vendor has put in my tracking code yet, it’s been a week. Waiting on his reply. I’ve had one sell on the first day, but were would I look in google to see if it’s working?

How long does it take for the Auto Placements data to show up?

I’ve come to realize that a lot of what is taught in th world of PPC is Search Network related and/or CPA offer related. I’m using Clickbank.

We’re using only the Content Network
Direct-linking to the Sales Page.

Settings:
Content Network box Checked and Relevant pages across the entire network.
Desktop and laptop computers Checked

Ad scheduling: Show ads all day and hours
Ad Rotation: Rotate: Show ads more evenly

AdGroup1 has 103 keywords
AdGroup2 has 75 keywords
These are long tail keywords between 3 to 6 words for each keyword;
Example: lose my belly fat, get rid of belly fat, how to get ripped abs, etc
Using Phrase and Exact Match Only

Managed Placement:
Used AdWordsDigger to pull Adsense sites for each AdGroup,
Ended up with about top 100 sites per AdGroup.

Started Day 1 (ran for 12 hours) with $.50 Max Bid and $100.00 budget
Locations: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Running 2 Text Ads per AdGroup
This is what we received for our stats-
AdGroup1: Impressions:43,217 Clicks:150 CTR:0.35% Avg CPC:$0.43 Ave
Position:3.5 Conversions:1 Managed Placement Clicks:19 Auto Placement Clicks:131

AdGroup2: Impressions:21,010 Clicks:60 CTR:0.29% Avg CPC:$0.42 Ave Position:3.7 Conversions:0 Managed Placement Clicks:21 Auto Placement Clicks:39

Day 2 (ran for 24 hours) lowered our bid to $.10 Max Bid with $100.00 budget
Locations: All Countries and Territories
Running 2 Text Ads and 5 Banner Ad variations per AdGroup
Here’s what we received-
AdGroup1: Impressions:26,499 Clicks:109 CTR:0.41% Avg CPC:$0.07
Ave Position:3.3 Conversions:0 Managed Placement Clicks:7 Auto Placement Clicks:102

AdGroup2: Impressions:132,657 Clicks:485 CTR:0.37% Avg CPC:$0.07 Ave
Position:2.7 Conversions:0 Managed Placement Clicks:22 Auto Placement Clicks:463

My Conclusion:
So after running through a ton of forum posts this is what I think I should do, let me know if I’m on track:
Set my budget to $20 a day at $.10 a click and let it run for a week or so, to get some solid data for better decision making.

I know a $100 bucks a day would give me a lot of data, but how much data do you really need, right?

Thanks in advance
Stacy

[Lucid]

Looks like a good start to me. You were even able to increase the click rate despite a lower bid. You have hundreds of clicks so only question is, are there sales and are you making a profit? Probably not at first. Continue testing new ads, weed out sites that are not giving good traffic. Increase the budget to get more exposure clicks and hopefully sales.

[henrow]

Thanks,
We're going to build out to 20 AdGroups with 30-50 keywords and see how that goes.

[Stangracer]

Hey Stacy,

When you setup conversion tracking in your Adwords account it should add conversion fields to your campaigns. You'll see the data right there. In general Google Conversion Tracking isn't perfect, you won't see everything every time. In testing I did I was losing 10% to 15% of my clicks.

Placement data as far as building placement reports takes about 48 hours before you can get to your data. As far as your Adwords account, the data usually lags about 3 hours.

The Content Network works a little differently than Search does. Looking at your campaign setup you might want to restructure your ad groups a little.

Google only uses 50 keywords per ad group on the content network and it is theme based so broad keywords are all that are needed.

The idea would be to use 10 to 15 keywords max per ad group in tight themes.

The combination of your Ad copy and ad group theme determines placement across the network.

At the very least don't use anymore than 50 keywords per ad group, as the rest aren't used by Google anyway.

The rest of your settings look OK. Setting your budget is really up to you. In general the lower your click cost, the lower your visitor quality. That doesn't mean you can't make sales with a low click cost. Same goes with daily budget, the higher the daily budget the more serious Google will take you.

Your CTR's are pretty good for the content network.

You'll want to groom your campaign using placement reports getting rid of the sites that are providing lots of clicks but no conversions.

As far as tracking goes... With direct linking you don't have a ton of options but there are a few. Since you doing placement advertising you can look at an awesome tool called Placement Intelligence, it has tracking built in for your placement ads. It's light years ahead of Adwords Digger.

You can also sign-up for a FREE Tracking202 account at Tracking202 Gateway

What's cool about this is not only can you direct link, you can still track your advertising and get real time data. Also you can cloak your data so that the publisher can't see how your campaign is working and possibly take it.

This would allow you to move forward and continue your testing without waiting for the publisher to post your tracking code.

Overall you're doing good.

Hope this helps,

Derek

[TimScott]

Originally Posted by henrow

Thanks,
We're going to build out to 20 AdGroups with 30-50 keywords and see how that goes.

was gonna say, your first mistake is having so many keyword in an adgroup. For content the max amount of keys per adgoup is 30, and even less in search. Let me ask you this, the way your building your keyword lists for content, are you going by the same methods as search? Because search and content adgroups are built completely different.

[henrow]

Yeah, that's true, I'm beginning to understand the "theme" of the keywords is important. I wish there was some good resources out there on the Content Network!

Any suggestions on material that is based primarily on the Content Network??

EVERYTHING out there is based on the search network. But that's not my focus.

[marketseeker]

download the google adwords desktop tool and use the keyword grouper.
I positive you can increase the ad groups you have to about 30 for a better everything. I didn't see anything about quality score. you really need to break up the keywords more so you can delete the ones not getting any conversions after about 300 clicks. Are you split testing ads?

Originally Posted by henrow

If someone can give me any input on my campaign. I know its only 1 ½ days of data, but I had to pause it because I realized that I have know idea if the Affiliate Vendor has put in my tracking code yet, it’s been a week. Waiting on his reply. I’ve had one sell on the first day, but were would I look in google to see if it’s working?

How long does it take for the Auto Placements data to show up?

I’ve come to realize that a lot of what is taught in th world of PPC is Search Network related and/or CPA offer related. I’m using Clickbank.

We’re using only the Content Network
Direct-linking to the Sales Page.

Settings:
Content Network box Checked and Relevant pages across the entire network.
Desktop and laptop computers Checked

Ad scheduling: Show ads all day and hours
Ad Rotation: Rotate: Show ads more evenly

AdGroup1 has 103 keywords
AdGroup2 has 75 keywords
These are long tail keywords between 3 to 6 words for each keyword;
Example: lose my belly fat, get rid of belly fat, how to get ripped abs, etc
Using Phrase and Exact Match Only

Managed Placement:
Used AdWordsDigger to pull Adsense sites for each AdGroup,
Ended up with about top 100 sites per AdGroup.

Started Day 1 (ran for 12 hours) with $.50 Max Bid and $100.00 budget
Locations: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Running 2 Text Ads per AdGroup
This is what we received for our stats-
AdGroup1: Impressions:43,217 Clicks:150 CTR:0.35% Avg CPC:$0.43 Ave
Position:3.5 Conversions:1 Managed Placement Clicks:19 Auto Placement Clicks:131

AdGroup2: Impressions:21,010 Clicks:60 CTR:0.29% Avg CPC:$0.42 Ave Position:3.7 Conversions:0 Managed Placement Clicks:21 Auto Placement Clicks:39

Day 2 (ran for 24 hours) lowered our bid to $.10 Max Bid with $100.00 budget
Locations: All Countries and Territories
Running 2 Text Ads and 5 Banner Ad variations per AdGroup
Here’s what we received-
AdGroup1: Impressions:26,499 Clicks:109 CTR:0.41% Avg CPC:$0.07
Ave Position:3.3 Conversions:0 Managed Placement Clicks:7 Auto Placement Clicks:102

AdGroup2: Impressions:132,657 Clicks:485 CTR:0.37% Avg CPC:$0.07 Ave
Position:2.7 Conversions:0 Managed Placement Clicks:22 Auto Placement Clicks:463

My Conclusion:
So after running through a ton of forum posts this is what I think I should do, let me know if I’m on track:
Set my budget to $20 a day at $.10 a click and let it run for a week or so, to get some solid data for better decision making.

I know a $100 bucks a day would give me a lot of data, but how much data do you really need, right?

Thanks in advance
Stacy

[cscarpero]

Match types don't mean anything in content network. Actually, individual keywords don't mean anything either. It's all about themes. You have too many keywords per ad group. You need to keep it under 50.

Also, content network traffic will tend to run a little slow and then ramp up. 50 cts is a little high on the bids.

Run a placement report to see where your traffic is coming from. Track everything. Know exactly who is sending you conversions. Block the sites that give you junk traffic after you get enough traffic to judge the site's quality. If the site has absolutely nothing to do with your niche, block it asap.

[AvidAZ]

I've never had good success in the content network. The traffic is much less targed when someone clicks through vs. someone searching directly for your keywords.

[TimScott]

Originally Posted by cscarpero

Match types don't mean anything in content network. Actually, individual keywords don't mean anything either. It's all about themes. You have too many keywords per ad group. You need to keep it under 50.

Also, content network traffic will tend to run a little slow and then ramp up. 50 cts is a little high on the bids.

Run a placement report to see where your traffic is coming from. Track everything. Know exactly who is sending you conversions. Block the sites that give you junk traffic after you get enough traffic to judge the site's quality. If the site has absolutely nothing to do with your niche, block it asap.

Thats true, only use broad type keys in content. Also you won't be tracking individual keywords them selves, you'll be tracking the entire adgroup. The reason for that is, because there is no way to tell which keyword the person used to get to the publishers website that your ad is on. So you need to do two things to optimize for content network to get the best results:

1.) Run a placement report once a week, so you can see which websites your popping up on. As good as google is, you won't always get the best websites for your campaign. So you'll need to site exclude all the irrelevant sites, parked domains, sites that aren't converting for you, and depending on your product, social networking sites are almost always going to perform horribly too.

2.) You need to have a clear understanding of the metrics of your campaign. Meaning, you need to know:

*Whats the max CPC you can run and still be profitable?
*Whats the most you can pay for a lead or a sale?
*etc...

And then the adgroups that aren't falling in line with your metrics, just delete them and move on. But also make sure you continually build upon your campaign as well.