Mastering Google AdWords Marketing: Contextual Advertising – Part 1
Separate your Google AdWords search advertising and contextual advertising. Why?
How? When creating an AdWords ad campaign, you will be given this choice:
Show ads on Google and the
search network
content network
Create two separate campaigns, one with only the search network box checked and one with only the content network box checked. The target audience for search ads and content ads (contextual ads) can be quite different. Let’s call them searchers (active) and browsers (passive), respectively. Searchers are actively typing the keywords you are bidding on. Browsers, who see your ad triggered by a contextual advertising system, are more passive in the sense that they didn’t type specific keywords into a search box.
Create separate ad campaigns with these distinct types of visitors in mind. For example, suppose you’re selling organic coffee beans online and you have the following keywords in both a search advertising campaign and a contextual advertising campaign (note that a real Google AdWords campaign would include broad, phrase and exact matches as opposed to simply broad matches):
organic coffee
organic coffee beans
coffee beans online
fair trade coffee
organic fair trade coffee
Let’s argue that a high percentage of people actively typing “fair trade coffee” into a search box (searchers) are interested in buying fair trade coffee. (Enticing them to actually buy from your site is a topic for another article.) Suppose a Google AdSense publisher has written an article covering the certification process for fair trade coffee. People reading this article (browsers) are likely not predisposed to want to purchase fair trade coffee. They could be more interested in the economics or politics of fair trade. Track your Google content ads and, if you receive too many clicks without sales, either modify the text of your content ads, reduce the bids or focus the keyword list. For example, if the keyword list above was originally incorporated into both a search ad campaign and a contextual ad campaign, the keyword list for the content ad could be altered to something more along these lines:
buy fair trade coffee
order fair trade coffee
purchase fair trade coffee
fair trade coffee online
This way, the search and content ads can diverge. The ad copy and/or keyword list and/or bids could evolve in different directions over time. If they are lumped together in the same AdWords campaign, a change in reaction to poor performance because of a single AdSense content page could severely limit a robust search ad campaign. Conversely, in some cases, a content ad might perform better than a search ad. Again, it’s useful to monitor the campaigns separately and to evolve them discretely.
Note that when creating a Google AdWords advertising campaign, displaying ads on Google itself is not an option but a given. Therefore, when you create two campaigns, they will, effectively, be competing against each other on Google’s own site(s). Consider always setting the bids lower, then, for one of the campaigns. Since contextual ads are usually not as effective as search ads, set the bids lower for the campaign with the content network box checked. Also, if you have created the ad copy with a contextual advertising audience in mind (for browsers), that ad might not be appropriate as a search ad on Google (for searchers) itself. Additionally, if you have created separate tracking urls for the two campaigns (highly recommended for whatever web analytics you use), it will be confusing to see ads with content tracking show up for Google searches.
In part two of this series, I’ll look at how splitting up your contextual and search ads can help improve your campaign performance.
August 1, 2005
Richard Ball founded Apogee Web Consulting LLC, a full service search engine marketing firm, to help businesses succeed on the internet. Apogee Web Consulting provides strategic internet marketing services including pay per click advertising, search engine optimization and shopping search engine submission. All search engine marketing services begin with a foundation of keyword research and web log analysis. Use the company’s free search engine marketing tools.
Prior to starting Apogee Web Consulting, Richard was a software developer for America Online. He has a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT.
Read by small business people, our newsletter delivers a digest of articles from the top search engine marketing experts. You will learn about:
Our newsletter is the perfect way to stay up to date with all of the latest trends, events and techniques in using search engines to grow your business and make more sales. Subscribe here. Your email address will NOT be given to third parties.
FreeFind Site Search Engine – FreeFind adds a “search this site” feature to your website, making your site easier to use. FreeFind also gives you reports showing what your visitors are searching for, enabling you to improve your site. FreeFind’s advanced site search engine and automatic site map technology can be added to your website for free.
Buy UPC Codes
Get your products listed online!
Search marketing information for small business owners.
Fetching the best small business news.
A friendly place to share small business ideas and knowledge.
Small business support through education, resources and community
The directory of the best small business sites and tools.
Copyright © 1998 – 2018 Search Engine Guide All Rights Reserved. Privacy
Research & References of Mastering Google AdWords Marketing: Contextual Advertising – Part 1|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks