Google Content Network.
- Thread starter Jordan
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Its tricky- Id stay away from placement for a bit, and drive kw content traffic. its slow going at first..its as if G needs to trust you first, then test you ctr a bit, then it lets you have a bit more over time. Whatever you do, be sure you site has ALL the things G wants...otherwise your doomed and wasting time.
make sure you bid enough to get the traffic started, even if that means bidding high and then work your bid down after the traffic starts flowing.
i had a strange experience the other week where i had a placement campaign in a really saturated niche and i set the bids real low at $0.20 cpc. at first it did the obvious and i didn't get any impressions for a few days, then i forgot about it and went away for the weekend and on monday morning i noticed the previous night i'd had over 100 clicks.
checking out the stats it appears one of the sites had triggered a couple of clicks which rapidly snowballed into a 6.27% ctr that set off the rest of the sites in the adgroup. its been happily chugging away ever since at the same bid price.
lesson learned target tight ctr matters a lot. i wouldn't recommend my strategy if you want results, narsticle is more on the money. just saying
Once you realize that CTR is probably the single most important thing with any ad campaign that's when you will start making money with ppc.
Ok. Most common mistake I see every. single. damn. time. someone starts running CN.
They hear about people getting cheap clicks, then decide "well hey, a 40 cent bid should be enough to start"
It's not.
Raise raise raise raise.
Get your CTR
then down down down down.
They hear about people getting cheap clicks, then decide "well hey, a 40 cent bid should be enough to start"
It's not.
Raise raise raise raise.
Get your CTR
then down down down down.
Just read your post, and its 100% how I do it. I tend to go with the sniper method. Prob the most important step is the keyword isolation. If you put {keyword} in your URL, you WILL get the individual keyword that triggered the click. Makes tracking easy-sauce. And yea as shady said, I always bid stupid high at first. Like $1.00+ for CN clicks.
on a non placement campaign (where i have some experience and aim for 3-4%+ per site) what should i be aiming for ctr wise? so far the best i've got is about 0.06%. pathetic i know but i'm just starting with keyword based cn.
also the other area i'm having a hard time with is generating negative keyword lists. i'm assuming this is the correct way of tightening a keyword based CN campaign, but unlike search where i can generally look at a page and visualize a gazillion keywords to bid on, negative keywords get me everytime.
is there a way of generating negative keyword lists through online research, tools or a specific thought process to walk through?
Placement reports+removing these locations=your friend.
To give you a baseline, one of my CN campaigns is avg position of 4.2 and an avg ctr of .24%. Some go as high as .7x%
But EVERY niche is different. In fact, it could be argued it's best you NOT know the baseline CTR for your niche. That way you keep working on it and improving it. Unless you're paying $0.01 per click with an average position of 1.0, you can still do better.
It's a little hard to compare CTRs on content network IMO. Google has to account for CTR on per-placement basis but you don't see that granularity looking at aggregate adgroup data. For example, .04% might be great for a content text ad at the bottom of myspace profiles because competition has shown that that placement never gets clicks regardless of advertiser. In the same way, a prominent adsense block above the fold may require a much better CTR even on the same domain to get any inventory.
Once you account for the fact that this issue is even more prominent across different website designs and adsense publishers then you can see that the math gets really really fuzzy.
Not doubting you know your shit dullspace, but I'm going to have to respectfully disagree here(though I wouldn't say my mind is closed to what you're saying)
When I look at the fact we have limits on the number of adgroups, keywords, and campaigns we can have, I see it as Google's way of essentially limiting the processing power we force them to use. While they do have an ungodly amount of power at their disposal, they know better than anyone that speed is important(that's why we have 10 results showing by default, not 20; they tested and decided the extra fraction of a second it took was signficant in terms of user experience).
Adwords CN is the same. Speed. To calculate the ad's individual CTR on each independent placement would be INSANELY wasteful. Especially since many pages get < 1 impressions per day.
Beyond that, the lag time before stats update, and lag time before campaign creation seems to me they're caching the data and not really using it on a rolling basis(but rather with an update every X minutes/hours).
They couldn't really cache the data on a per-placement basis for every ad on every page the keywords occur.
I could be wrong here. But it's just what seems most logical to me, and seems to hold true in my own campaigns. But it's a bit of a pain in the ass to effectively test the theory in any meaningful way
Edit: Perhaps this changes around a bit if the person is targetting a specific placement?
Say you put up a campaign with $1 bids. How long do you wait to start dropping them and by how much do you drop them? Do you slowly drop a few cents every day or do you do larger drops but spread them out more?
Also when testing new ads trying to increase your ctr do you stick the new ads into an existing adgroup or do you just copy the keywords from that adgroup and form a new one?
Also when testing new ads trying to increase your ctr do you stick the new ads into an existing adgroup or do you just copy the keywords from that adgroup and form a new one?
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