Content Network Blues

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chrisr

chrisr

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Jul 17, 2007
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Dallas, Texas
Okay, we have a succesfull campaign / niche on social networks we want to replicate in GCN.

So far, based on my demographic, I came up with 10 different campaigns, one ad group each, with keywords targeted for that campaign.

over the past 5 days, we have been removing poor performing sites by CTR on a daily basis, getting our clicks in the 1000+ total daily (we feel this is a good volume for testing before scaling) and our CTRs for text ads between .10% and .23%.

Now, we so far have only found one site that needs to be pulled out into its own focused adGroup due to click volume. All other clicks are comprised of lots of sites with 2-3 clicks.

We also removed all the big volume sites like youTube, etc.

The problem is conversions are crap. We have a lot of experience in the niche and have highly tuned landers, so I am wondering if I am missing something.

All the sites with 2-3 clicks dont have enough data for me to rule them out, only the sites in aggregate.

so given a scenario like this, how do some of you GCN rockstars continue to Tune the campaign for conversions?

Are thoughts at this point:

1) abandon keywords, and focus solely on site / keyword combos where we know a lot of our demographic would be

2) Negative out the CTR winners AND the loosers - then get fresh sites the next day. Take all CTR winners and then use a site/keyword adgroup to focus the traffic

3) consider our keywords a flop, and take a look at a different set of keywords

4) Keep the keywords and get super aggresive on negative keywords based on sites we have seen so far that we think are not a match.

Opinions?
 


I visit quite a few of the high volume sites to see the quality of their site. If it's an adsense farm I obviously block it. If it's some really crappy low quality site, I may also block it. If it's a site that's borderline not within my niche boundaries, I may can it as well depending on whether it sent any conversions or not.

I almost always block about.com and those types of "curiousity" sites that aren't niche focused (about.com focuses on just about anything which I consider lower quality).

This is just my experience and YMMV.
 
I had a similar experience with the content network. I always knew that the conversions would be obviously lower than search but mine were unbelievable crap. Haven't touched the content network after that so I'm kind of hoping a content powerhouse would drop some knowledge here as well. btw does content need to approve text ads like they need to do with image ads?
 
I'm not going to expose all my super-secret ninja tactics for the content network but keep in mind that clicks off of the content network are by nature very "click happy" and are likely to suffer from severe ADD. Make sure you write your ads and design your landing pages around that and you shall succeed.

I will share two obvious tips: Give them the big picture first (instant solution/fix) with some before/after pics. Make sure that this page is short and extremely easy to read.Then force them to make a commiment (click a link/optin to your list) and then hit them with your "my weight loss story" LP.
 
pileofcrap said:
Are you removing even sites that get you clicks?

Also, chrisr, are you from the south?
Click to expand...

no, right now we are just negativing out the CTR losers. We where considering taking out the CTR winners as well so that we are basically using GCN keyword search to find possible winning sites, and then treat them seperately in their own placement targeted campaign.

I am from texas.
 
ours is a big picture lander. They just enter a few easy pieces of data to move on.

On social networks, we are seeing 30% completion when they hit our lander to the offer page.

on Content Network, we are seeing 10%.

How about negative keywords - how aggresive are you with them on GCN?

Or do you have a list of a few 1000 sites that you know are crap and knock out first?

ayzo said:
I'm not going to expose all my super-secret ninja tactics for the content network but keep in mind that clicks off of the content network are by nature very "click happy" and are likely to suffer from severe ADD. Make sure you write your ads and design your landing pages around that and you shall succeed.

I will share two obvious tips: Give them the big picture first (instant solution/fix) with some before/after pics. Make sure that this page is short and extremely easy to read.Then force them to make a commiment (click a link/optin to your list) and then hit them with your "my weight loss story" LP.
Click to expand...
 
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