Matt Lawless - Internet Marketing Consultant

In the first of this two-part article, I will look at how to properly construct Content Campaigns within Google, and how to get your adverts placed within relevant websites…

Google is undeniably the king of search-engine traffic, but most marketers stick to Search traffic for their campaigns and completely ignore the Content Network. Why is this? For most, it is simply that they have never made it work effectively. I know from bitter experience that the content network can bleed an advertising budget dry without delivering ANY value at all.

When I was setting up my first Internet business, the lure of £0.05 clicks on the content network, as opposed to £1.00 clicks on the search network, was hard to ignore. So why shouldn’t I just turn on that little check-box in my Campaign Manager and throw my carefully-worded ad campaigns in front of literally millions of users? Surely some of it will stick? Erm… No! There was definitely an effect to be seen, but only in that my budget was used up in mega-quick time with almost nothing to show for it.

So what do you have to do to make this succeed?

First of all, and of the utmost importance, there are fundamental differences in the way Google matches ads up to users between the Search and Content networks. You will know, if you have read anything on the subject, that search ad groups should be kept as tight as possible, often with a single keyword phrase matched up to a specific ad written just for that keyword. This is a great strategy for search but not so for content. You see, when you include content matching within Adwords, Google doesn’t work at the keyword level. It would be almost impossible for Google’s bots to know where to place an ad based upon a single keyword, so instead, Google matches at the AdGroup level. So potentially if you have an existing Search campaign with several similar AdGroups, turning Content matching on, potentially will see your own AdGroups competing against one another as Google attempts to match each AdGroup to a relevant content page.

Separate your Search & Content Campaigns

The way to get around all this, is to start off by splitting out campaigns so that they only address either Search traffic or Content traffic. Not only will this enable you to construct AdGroups that are matched to the way Google will place the ads, but it also prevents the much-lower CTR for content ads to affect the overall CTR for each campaign. By splitting out the campaign types, you will also be able to monitor and control spending more efficiently.

Effective AdGroup Construction

I talked earlier about how Google matches ads destined for the content network based upon an AdGroup as opposed to a Keyword. It looks at the overall ‘theme’ of the AdGroup to identify where best to show your ads (the content of the Ad itself is also widely believed to have an impact). So to ensure that your ads are placed where you want them to be seen, you have to help Google along.

In your AdGroup, you need to put keywords and keyphrases that, combined, will show where Google should target your ad. One trick I use to work out which keywords to use, is to find the ‘perfect’ site addressing your target market. Let’s say to want to attract someone who reads the Wall Street Journal’s Market’s section. Take a trip to www.wsj.com and browse to the Markets section. Right click on the page and choose the option to ‘View Source’. This will being up a text-version of the page you are looking at, along with the way the WSJ categorises itself for the search engines. Chances are, that their categorisation will match that of yoru target market. You need to look at the source page and find where it says meta name=”keywords”. Each phrase after this, separated by a comma, could work very well for your keyword/phrase list. Incidently, the list in the above example would be financial markets, stock, stock news, investments, stock market, market, todays market, bonds, securities, equities, commodities, foreign exchange, broker-dealer, banks, trading which seems pretty decent to me as a starting point.

In Part 2 I will show you how Negative keywords will really improve your performance, and some of the key considerations for effective ad copy.

Articles, Marketing Tips, PPC