An Experiment With Google Adwords Content Network

by Nail Yener

Posted: 15 years ago 20 replies

Hi,

First of all, let me say that I am not much experienced with Adwords and I haven't made any money on it yet, though I made some affiliate money with other methods. In fact I lost some money on Adwords since I didn't bother optimizing my campaign. Now I started a new campaign solely targeting the content network and wanted to share my progress with you. I will try to post daily, if I can.

I just want to remind one thing: The real purpose of Adwords is not to sell, it is to get the visitor to the website, which will then try to sell. And my purpose here is to have as much clicks as I can although a high CTR will always be good.

Ok, here comes the results for the first 2 days:

Day 1 (07 Agu)

Impressions: 863
Clicks: 1
CTR: 0,12
Earnings: 0

Day 2 (08 Agu)

Impressions: 4826
Clicks: 5
CTR: 0,10
Earnings: 0

In Total

Impressions: 5689
Clicks: 6
CTR: 0,11
Earnings: 0

Here, earnings stands for affiliate earnings. I will be updating in the next days. Take care for the moment. By the way, may I ask, what CTR can be counted as good for the content network?

#adwords #content #experiment #google #network

jsmith2482 15 years ago

Are you not discouraged by the lack of clicks? Are they converting to opt-ins?
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Lucid 15 years ago

> The real purpose of Adwords is not to sell, it is to get the visitor to the website, which will then try to sell.

Someone who gets it.

> By the way, may I ask, what CTR can be counted as good for the content network?

I used to want a minimum of 0.1% (1/1000), double that would be good. Then, I figured my minimum goal should be one tenth the CTR of the search campaign. Then I got smarter. I don't manage many content network campaigns but I do have one which is just under 2%, about half the search campaign. This by careful planning, testing, monitoring and adjusting.

There is no "good' or "bad" CTR, in content or search. Advertising some products is easy and you can get CTRs in double digits. Others more difficult and 2-3% CTRs may be normal even for the best ads.
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- Terry Kyle 15 years ago
  
  Perry Belcher, one of the gurus of AdWords, loves the Content Network but recommends edgy, shock-tactic headlines and copy there to get interest unlike Search which is more product/problem-solution oriented.
  
  Worth trying a few National Inquirer-type ads as an experiment?
  
  Best of luck with it.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Nail Yener 15 years ago
  
  @jsmith2482: I am not discouraged since this is the content network, and in addition, I am just not much experienced with adwords. Trying to figure out what works and what doesn't for the moment. I hope the CTR will increase by some twist on the ads.
  
  Here comes the numbers for yesterday:
  
  Day 3 (09 Agu)
  
  Impressions: 9932
  Clicks: 14
  CTR: 0,14
  Earnings: 0
  
  Up To Now(3 Days):
  
  Impressions: 15621
  Clicks: 20
  CTR: 0,13
  Earnings: 0
  
  I will try adding some new adgroups and work on the existing ads a bit today. See you later. Do you have any idea where can I find good websites to include in my campaign to have my ads on?
  
  Thanks
  
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nelson32 15 years ago

i would like to tell you is dont delete campaign once you started, by starting a campaign means getting impressions for your ads and impressions are always good.
Also once your CTR is increasing ,let it increase coz there is rule in adwords that if you have high CTR ,you would end up paying less CPC..so dont delete campigns coz it will again effect your CTR ...

You should try content network only when your search network is performing.Content network can be messy sometimes...

If your search network is not performing then check the content you are providing and do a A/B ad testing on your ad groups...

Do use placement targeting if using content network and find out sites by diferent adgroups keywords..

Use all keyword matching types in your adgroups..
Brainstorm as many key phrases you can..(use keyword tool)
Use negetive keywords....

Try adwords when your product have high commissions and decent conversion rate..

Keep in mind that your content should be worthwhile for a visitor who comes,if you lack in this then surely you would end up losing money...

Also analyse your competitors....
thats all i can say..

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Lucid

15 years ago

> Do you have any idea where can I find good websites to include in my campaign to have my ads on?

When adding a new site, click on the Placement Tool link. It will be to the right of the edit box, sometimes below it. A new window will open. Find sites by topic or enter a keyword.

Thanks
1 reply

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Nail Yener

15 years ago

Yesterday I tried optimizing some of the adgroups and added new ones. Now I get more impressions and more clicks. In addition a 0.01 point increase in overall CTR. Yet, I am not seeing any results in terms of earnings. Today I will play a bit with the adgroups that rank well and see the result.

Day 4 (10 Agu)

Impressions: 28408
Clicks: 43
CTR: 0,15
Earnings: 0

Up To Now(4 Days):

Impressions: 44029
Clicks: 63
CTR: 0,14
Earnings: 0

By the way, which information is allowed to share with others? Can I share the cost or average CPC too?

Thanks
1 reply

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Nail Yener

15 years ago

Yesterday, I got a lot of impressions yet very few clicks. And no earnings again. I checked the content network from where the traffic came. I saw that most of the impressions without clicks came from mail.google.com or some parked domains, which are useless in terms of quality traffic. Immediately I excluded them, then checked other domains and spotted the irrelevant ones and excluded them too. Additionally I added some sites related to my niche, targeting different adgroups. I guess it will take some time until I get some real results out of this.

Day 5 (11 Agu)

Impressions: 48551
Clicks: 42
CTR: 0,09
Earnings: 0

Up To Now(5 Days):

Impressions: 92580
Clicks: 105
CTR: 0,11
Earnings: 0

Today I will try to find some more related sites and add them to the managed placements.

Thanks
2 replies

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Dave Ward

15 years ago

Originally Posted by ademmeda

Yesterday, I got a lot of impressions yet very few clicks. And no earnings again.

Today I will try to find some more related sites and add them to the managed placements.

I can't give you specific advice, because I have no idea of your niche,or what action you want as a conversion, be that a Sale or E-mail Optin etc ?, but when i total up your clicks you have sent over 100 visitors to your landing page and no earnings. You are doing a great job on optimising your campaign, but I would start to look at the page you are sending this traffic to. 200 visitors is the max you need to tell you if you need to change it. Even after 100 I would say it is worth looking at though. Look at the offer, and the page content, does it match the ad in terms of why they clicked through ?

In terms of adding placements, be sure to look at where those clicks are coming from and if you feel those sites content match well with your product, and ad those as placements too.

The placements should give you a higher CTR and Conversion rate.

You are on the right lines, you are doing everything right in terms of optimising the campaign, it does take time to get it right.

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SmartMarketer 15 years ago

Hi,

I have many campaigns on the Content Network. And I can say your CTR is pretty good. It depends on the niche and market as well.

I would like to add my experience here.

It is not the same thing to sell the same stuff on the contant network, as on the search network. Because people click on the ads on the content network while they are browsing, not necessarily searching for your product to buy.

That means, you will easier get optins, CPA sales on the content network, but not the higher priced items sales. So I am promoting my squeeze pages and CPA offers on the content, and products regularly priced on the search network.

Hope that helps.
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- Nail Yener 15 years ago
  
  Hello again,
  
  Some great news today . I knew it would work. I got my first sale from that (content network) campaign yesterday. And believe me this sale was the only one for the past year. Considering that I haven't made any money from any kind of PPC before, I can say that it is a good start. Let me give the stats for yesterday and then share some details with you.
  
  Day 6 (12 Agu)
  
  Impressions: 24689
  Clicks: 29
  CTR: 0,12
  Earnings: 26.96$
  
  Up To Now(6 Days):
  
  Impressions: 117269
  Clicks: 134
  CTR: 0,11
  Earnings: 26,96$
  Total Ad Spent: 5,25$
  
  Ok, here are some details about the campaign. I am promoting a "health & fitness" related product from Clickbank (some of you might guess what it is). I chose this one because I said to myself that this product sells itself already, if only I could direct some targeted clicks to it. I have neither my own domain nor any landing pages, just direct linking to the merchant site without any domain masking or redirecting.
  
  I deleted some adgroups that performed really poor in terms of CTR. And continued to exclude all the irrelevant sites I get impressions, from the network. Today, I will be further testing the ads in order to try to increase the CTR, and add some more adgroups with totally different keyword themes and see what happens.
  
  By the way, I came accross a free software called Adwords Digger which helps find the sites that serve Adsense ads related to the keywords you input (that was something that I thought would be good to have just yesterday!). Content networkers may want to have a look at it.
  
  I don't know how far I can go with the content network but I guess I will like it, especially while having clicks for 2-4 cents. That means having 100 clicks for an average of 3$. If only I could have a 1% conversion rate, then, selling any product that gives commissions above 20$ would mean incredible ROI at least for myself.
  
  See you.
  
  [ 1 ] Thanks
  
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dle45 15 years ago

I applaud you taking experimenting with adwords even though you admit that you haven't had good success with them in the past.

If I may throw in my two cents...I manage several client PPC accounts and starting with the content network is never something that we do. For us it would be almost try doing the opposite of what you know works.

PPC is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site and is 100% track able down to the penny.

The reason you start off with the content network off is because you don't know yet what keywords are giving you a good CTR or even converting for you.

After 5 days of running our PPC campaigns we then convert it into a content campaign. We always run content campaigns alone and only after we know what converts or gives a good CTR

So when the five days have come we scrape out all the good converting KW's and take out the bad one that aren't getting clicks or good CTR ( however we should be doing this from day one)

Take the converting KW a find the top ten sites that run adsense for those words. There is a free tool you can use at adwordsdigger. I am not affiliated with this at all but I know its free if you opt in. I use a different program.

Test every day. Run two ads for each adword. Run the ads evenly so you know what converts best. Look at it daily and make changes to the worst performing one.

I won't go into depth about our whole 90 cycle but once you get a grasp of PPC its a great skill to have.

Good luck...test test test

daniel
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Steven Carl Kelly 15 years ago

Are you running image ads, text ads, or both?
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jsmith2482 15 years ago

Are you running conversion tracking to see how many leads opt-in?
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pauljeaston 15 years ago

At 4 cents, that's probably a text ad. I'm also venturing my content network campaign and this needs thorough split testing and tracking.
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- Organic Chem 14 years ago
  
  The idea of running paid search then using your converting keywords from search for content usually won't work. Content network is a completely different beast. I feel that 95% of what you read on the web concerning content network is either outdated or simply wrong. Test for yourself and your data will dictate what will work.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  jburke 14 years ago
  
  Hey ademmeda ,
  
  Some of the things I read in the replies to your posts were not correct so let me help you understand a few things.
  
  Yes, the content network is shaky and truly a different beast than search, but with a few optimization techniques almost any body can find efficiencies on it. A good CTR depends on how well the keywords' relationship is to the historical CTR of the ads, which is exactly what the large majority of quality score is based off of on content, CTR!! You have to be careful changing up too many things with a content campaign. Anytime you change up ads, google is essentially re-spidering your ads to figure out the best sites to display them on. Same thing when you add/remove keywords from an ad group in content. If you want to split test ad copy for content, make the changes very minimal to the winning ad. That means experimenting with variations of punctuation or capitilization, etc.
  Think about this, there are only soo many spots to show up on, on average, with most content sites. So, you always want to be in a high position, to ensure you're showing up on the most available sites. I aim for sitting around the 3 spot. When you get into placement targeting, that's where you can capitilize on higher bids for more control.
  At a breif glance of your CTR's you posted before, it seems that you're getting a ton of impressions. Are you running placement performance reports and excluding negative sites? This needs to be done regularly to avoid bad sites. Have you been in the site and category exclusion tool? You need to exclude whatever topics or themes that you do not want to show on. What are your campaign settings like? Do you have ad rotation on optimize or rotate? I hope your content campaign settings are only on content of course.
  
  Quick tips with creating a content campaign. Create 50-100 tightly themed ad groups with 1-5 tightly themed keywords. Think themes! repeat keywords throughout random ad groups to ensure the general theme is portrayed throughout the entire campaign. This helps Google determine what your overall theme is which helps to figure out which pages to display you on. Also make sure you don't have any or very little negative keywords in this campaign. This can exclude you from entire sites with just one negative keyword. Also only bid on broad match keywords. The ad copy is also huge like one reply said, use attention diverting ad copy that going to get people to think.
  I hope this has helped. Trust me on these suggestions, all of these are truly best practices for being profitable on content, which almost any marketer can be.
  
  J
  
  Thanks
  
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oscarkool

14 years ago

Seriously I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get impressions!!!!! 2-4 cents? I put my bids at 50 cents and I still get only 500 imps a day with 6000 keywords and 20 keywords per adgroup, all themed!!!! What the **** am I doing wrong?

Thanks
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Nail Yener

14 years ago

Originally Posted by oscarkool

Before I paused this experiment, I was getting a good number of impressions and clicks for 1 cent. And this was with direct linking. I am working on other projects right now and don't have time to go deep in adwords. Actually I will turn to this soon and will not use direct linking anymore, because it certainly decreases the amount of impressions you could get (1 domain rule). I will get my own domain and create a simple landing page and drive traffic to there.

@oscarkool: We are talking about content network right? Are you direct linking? Do your keywords have high search volumes to expect more than 500 imps a day?

Thanks
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warrior123 14 years ago

Don't automatically delete parking domains! If it's a highly relative keyword domain then that traffic is highly qualified. Especially if it is a 1 or 2 keyword domain like "dietpill.com" for example. That is what is called a "direct navigation" domain that a lot of people type directly into the URL -- very targeted traffic!

With the content network, you really need to know what sites your ad is running on and what the ad position is in the block of ads or ad. You are going to want to be in the top 1-4 link ad to get the most clicks and highest CTR. If you are shooting for a really high CTR you aren't going to want an ad running on their 3rd adsense block at the footer of the page.
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An Experiment With Google Adwords Content Network

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