Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it.

A couple years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can spend most of your money on sites that are bringing in quality traffic. This is a quick graphic of the workflow that I still use today.

• The ‘Discovery Campaign’ is one of your lower daily budgets, and its goal is to find good placements where you want to spend more money
• The Placement’s Campaign is one of your higher budgets as it only contains sites that are helping you reach your overall goals

While I find this workflow is very useful, the overall problem is when do you decide to block placements? In your AdWords account, the only data you can see for any placement is conversions and conversion rates. The problem with so little data is that if you wait until you have enough statistically significant data to make a decision, you will never find all of the good placements, and spent too much money on bad ones.

There is another way to gain insight into placements with Google Analytics that you can use to determine if a site is sending you quality traffic.

Evaluating Placements with Google Analytics

To have access of this data you need to link your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account. Next, navigate to the placements information under the AdWords reports (found under traffic sources).

If you have goals setup, then you can sort by the goal completions, conversion rates, and other data points to find the sites that are doing well for you.

While this data is useful for adding placements, it can also be useful for finding placements that you want to block even if you don’t have statistical data.

Sort Placements by Bounce Rates

Instead of trying to find sites that you want to add as placements, examine bounce rates to find sites where the traffic is so poor, you don’t want to wait for statistical data.

In this case, we have a handful of sites that have sent more than 18 visitors and have a 100% bounce rate. No one from any of those sites has even gone to a second page, therefore, we will often block these even though we don’t have statistically significant data.

Please note, you don’t want to just block sites if there bounce rates are 100%. You should also double check the ad copy and landing pages to make sure the offers are relevant for that site. If you consistently see high bounce rates for your display campaigns, then you might need to change the offer and landing page before deciding to block placements.

Just remember, a bounce in Google Analytics is a visitor who only went to a single page and then left your site. If someone gets to your landing page, picks up the phone and calls you, finishes an order over the phone and then leaves your site – they will be counted as a bounce even if they spent twenty minutes on the phone with you.

Create Interaction Goals

A quick way of seeing what sites are bringing in good versus poor traffic is to create interaction goals within Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can create goals based upon time on site or page views per visit.

If you create goals with these types of metrics, then you can easily examine what sites are not meeting your basic minimum interaction and then block those sites that are underperforming.

Conversely, if you find that sites are bringing in visitors that are spending several minutes on your site, you shouldn’t block those sites until you have enough clicks to determine if those visitors will eventually convert.

By using interaction goals, you can gain another level of insight into the placements where you are spending money, so you can make better decisions about block the sites or spending more money on the sites to gather more data.

If you have various types of goals on your site, I would recommend splitting out these types of goals by goal set. You might have one goal set that is all revenue events, and another one that is site interaction. By splitting these different types of goals out by goal set, then you can see one tab of just interaction goals, and another tab of just revenue goals. That way your revenue goal events will not be polluted by site interaction events and vice versa.

Conclusion

Overall, I like Google’s display network. There is a lot of traffic and conversions to be had from managing it correctly. However, if managed incorrectly, the display network can be a money pit. Therefore, you do need a system for managing the display network so it will perform for you.

However, the patience and money required to always have statistically relevant data is beyond what most AdWords advertisers have. Therefore, when you see sites that have several visits and 100% bounce rates, feel free to block them quickly. When you see sites that have some visitors, and those visitors are spending time on your site, then you should be more patient in determining if the site will eventually be a converting one for you.

By using Google Analytics to examine your AdWords data, you can go beyond just examining conversion rates to also determining interaction rates and gaining another viewpoint into the placement sites where you are spending your money, so that you can spend your budget as wisely as possible.

If you’re buying display ads and don’t know about these lies, you’re wasting a good chunk of your money.

In Vanessa Fox’s recent article about the Food Network vs AllRecipes battle to be the top food portal, she quotes an executive at the Food Network promoting what has often been a “funny-money” metric in ad sales. “Advertisers can trust that when they buy ads from us, they are connecting with Allrecipes’ vibrant, active and engaged community.”

An engaged community… You mean one that spends a lot of time on the site, right? Viewing a number of pages, showing that the content really appeals to them?

Awesome! For the website itself…

Lie #1: Engaged Audiences Are Desirable

It’s no secret in web analytics that, in general, your lowest bounce rates and most engaged visitors come from the direct traffic segment. The problem is that these are the exact visitors that are most likely to ignore banners. I addressed this briefly in Advertising Lies: Engaged Audience.

“Engaged audiences don’t click.

Ask any AdSense publisher who clicks his ads most, and you’ll hear that search engine traffic is great. Heck, Chiticka has an ad product exclusively dedicated to monetizing publishers’ traffic earned from SEO.

Within blackhat SEO, it’s also known that providing a poor user experience – where the item sought for in the search isn’t present on the landing page – generates high AdSense clickthrough rates. The AdSense block is the most relevant thing on the page – it best matches the keywords searched for, and is the best next step for the visitor. So they click.”

I know folks using other traffic generation methods and generating double digit CTRs on AdSense, using this tactic, and that’s been the case for years. To put that into its proper context, Problogger estimates most bloggers get 2-5% CTR.

If you’re a direct marketer being sold display ads by a salesman who boasts of his engaged audience… take a pass.

Lie #2: Engaged Audiences Are Undesirable

The flip side of the coin is that some brand advertisers don’t mind not getting clicks. It’s wasteful since you could build a relationship, but they’re alright with only having their ads displayed, because they’re trying to send a simple message – e.g. a brand positioning statement that doesn’t require elaboration – because by sheer repetition they’ll create demand and preference for their brand… the sales will [hopefully - you're not always tracking this directly] come later.

What matters to these advertisers is having the correct demographic makeup in the audience, to ensure that they’re reaching their market. And one of the most reliable ways to do that is to buy ads targeted to an engaged audience, because it’s predictable who that audience is, demographically. That’s what services like Quantcast are for.

Lie #3: The Whole Audience Is Equally Engaged.

Unless you’re buying ads on a site that is wholly reliant on search traffic, chances are the audience is made up of a mix of traffic from different sources.

There are a few implications:

First, run-of-site ads in big media are almost always a bad idea. If you’re a direct marketer, you’re more interested in the search referred traffic, and don’t want the “engaged audience.” If you’re going for branding, you want the engaged audience and the search traffic – which is often irrelevant to a site’s core topic – is not what you’re really after.

Second, you want to be able to target by referring source. You can agree to sign an NDA and ask for a peak at their analytics, or get a third party to audit the data.

Third, measurements and boasts about the biggest portal are pointless. Yes, both quality and quantity are important. But when a company like ComScore makes a fuss because it appears The Food Network has more traffic in absolute numbers than AllRecipes, the best response is to shrug: “so what?” That doesn’t tell me, the ad buyer who’s supposedly interested in this fact, about the numbers of visitors fitting into the particular segment(s) I care about.

Besides which, there’s another lie that makes this big to do pointless:

Lie #4: Panels Don’t Lie.

Panel data is skewed. If you’ve compared your own site’s numbers to Compete.com’s numbers, you know there’s a significant difference. I’ve confirmed this with other publishers.

That isn’t to pick on Compete specifically, it’s just an example (and their products have other value, like finding what keywords competitors use, not to mention being more reliable than tools that just provide educated guesses, like Quantcast at times).

Similarly, since there’s a cost to recruit a user, you can expect that a large percentage of panels are simply made up of the users whose acquisition cost (CPA) was lowest.

That being said, some panels and comparable services like Quantcast are moving further along in the direction of directly auditing traffic data with their own snippet of code tagging all the sites’ pages.

So the moral of this last bit here is not to buy ads based on panel data unless it’s directly measured.

To conclude

Pay attention to the details of what traffic’s attention you’re buying. Engagement suits some but not others, and anyways there’s a variety of engagement with a site’s audience.

Get as much data you can on the audience, and see if it’s possible to only buy the engaged/non-engaged audiences that suit your goals, or else to negotiate the price on the audiences that are less appealing if you must buy them as a bundle with the others.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

I’ve known Shelley for several years and she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met when it comes to Display Advertising. In fact, she’s earned the name Display Advertising Evangelist due to her dedication to the space.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Shelley for Marketing Nirvana. The episode will air June 6th at noon EST (9am PST). You can hear it live at WebmasterRadio.fm.

While we covered a range of display network topics; we mostly focused on topic targeting.

Topic targeting allows you to serve ads based upon a topic – no keywords or placements are required. Choosing just a topic can bring in more inventory that most companies can handle (and convert). This feature only works across the Google display network.

While most people won’t want to use topic targeting all by itself; it can be a fantastic restrictive marketing technique when used in conjunction with placements, remarketing, or even keywords.

In fact, I so much enjoyed the topic with Shelley that I also wrote my most recent Search Engine Land article on 3 Ways Topic Targeting Can Improve Your Display Advertising.

If you can’t catch the show live, you can always subscribe via iTunes.

Please note, if you’re a premium member, you can watch the Topic Targeting Video Lesson and receive more insights on topic targeting.

If you’d like to learn more about Shelley, you can see her blog or content network insider training site.

Google released a whitepaper that highlighted the content network’s effectiveness. I wanted to make a few notes and points before linking to the paper:

• Google says that the two most common features used by advertisers who see good returns from smart pricing are site exclusion (blocking your ad from being shown on certain sites) and Google’s conversion optimizer.
  • Unfortunately, Google does not make mention of account organization (content only campaigns, search only, mixed, etc)
  • In general, I agree that using excluded domains is key, but only after your organization is correct. However, I’m a larger fan of site targeting and a different keyword sets.
• Google only mentions the CPA differences, not the bidding differences of successful advertisers.
• The paper breaks spend down into three categories (per month)
  • • Less than $1,138
    • Between $1,138 and $5943
    • More than $5943
  • I must admit, those numbers seem confusing to me. They seem to indicate that of those advertisers in the study that 1/3rd falls into each spend level. Unfortunately, they don’t call out if that spend is only on the content network or the overall spend of the account.
  • Google has found that the smaller spends do better on content network, and that there seem to be a limit to the total numbers of available conversions on content.
  • I really wonder, and have absolutely no data to support this, if affiliates are throwing off those spend numbers. Many ‘make a million dollars overnight’ affiliate training classes are made up of individuals with smaller spends; but hear wonderful things about the content network (I often find that the more sophisticated the advertiser; the more likely they like content. This does not mean that the content network will work for all advertisers even if they do it right – just a general observation as more sophisticated advertiser’s often test things themselves to see the results).
• Overall, the content network and search network end up with similar CPAs (a bit of variety by country).
  • Again, this does not surprise me at all as it’s an aggregate number. I see many companies who do fantastic with content, and many who see the opposite. If that’s average out; seeing similar CPAs isn’t surprising.
  • In addition, since the other feature that Google states is a common thread between account who do well on the content network is conversion optimizer where you set a CPA; seeing the CPAs on those accounts regardless of traffic should be similar.

Anyway, it’s a good read, just remember to optimize your accounts properly:

Google content network paper.

Very important things to keep in mind about the content network:

• Search Ads & Contextual Ads Are Different! You Need To Treat Them Separately
• How to optimize a contextual search advertising campaign
• Block low quality traffic
• Peak behind the curtain to see to learn what AdSense sites are doing for you
• About smart pricing
• Content network suggestions from Google

Search and content are different. I think we can all finally agree on that sentiment.

With search, someone is actively looking for information. Their goal is to click on a link.

With content, someone is looking at related information. They may click when they are finished reading the page.

The mentality of active search versus random discovery lends itself to not just using different keywords for your search and content campaigns. It also shows that you should test different landing pages for the two mediums as well.

Here are the results of a test that was conducted using different landing pages across search and content.

The Company’s Products

This company offers two products (Since they are so niche, I’m using the proverbial plumber services instead of their actual product – everything else is the same):

• A database where subscribers can find local services
  • It’s a subscription based model – this is where they make money
• A free listing where local services can input their information and hopefully be hired by the subscribers.
  • The listings are verified. This leads to creating a high trust factor for the consumer
  • The company doesn’t make money on these listings, this is increased value to the subscribers

The Website’s Landing Pages

The website has two different types of pages.

Segmentation page. The home page has two navigation paths: One is for listing services (free) and the other is for finding services (subscription). The page has many trust elements (BBB, SSL, Associations, etc).

City Landing pages. For each major metro, they have a page that lists the city, has a picture of the city, lists the services, how many companies are in their database for that city, etc.

Two very different pages.

Conventional wisdom says to put the Chicago searchers on the Chicago city page, and the Miami searchers on the Miami city page.

Was conventional wisdom correct?

The Actual PPC Test

There were 21 campaigns set up for this test.

• Campaign 1: Search only using Geo-modified keywords (i.e. Chicago Plumber)
• Campaign 2-11 (10 campaigns): Search only using location targeted campaigns (i.e. each campaign only targeted a single city such as Chicago, NYC, Miami, etc). Keywords were not geo specific (i.e. Plumber)
• Campaign 12-21 (10 campaigns) Content only. Location targeted campaigns using the same cities, keywords and ad copy as the Search only campaigns above (essentially, the exact same campaign, just content instead of search targeted)

The visitors for all the campaigns were sent to two different landing pages:

• Home page (which is a segmentation page)
• City Landing page which corresponded to the appropriate city for the IP targeting campaign or geographic keywords

For this test, only a subscription was considered a conversion. Listing free information was not considered a conversion as it’s not the way the company makes money.

A very simple split test was used to execute all of the testing.

The Resulting PPC Data

The Search Campaigns (campaigns 1-11) all had very similar data. There were a few outliers at the keyword / ad copy intersection. However, in general every campaign behaved very similarly. This includes both geo-modified keywords and location targeted campaigns (which doesn’t always happen).

The Content Campaigns (12-21) also had similar data. There were a few more outliers in this campaign, but those outliers made up less than 10% of the keyword / ad copy intersections, and less than 8% of the total clicks and impressions.

Was conventional wisdom correct?

Conventional wisdom says the city pages should outperform the home page. After all, those pages are more specific to the user – correct?

Upon first examination, it appears that conventional wisdom was correct. The conversion rate and cost per conversion are lower for the city landing page than the home page.

However, never combine search and content when examining data – NEVER.

On the content network, conventional wisdom was correct. The City Landing Pages had a cost per conversion of $8.99 vs. the $13.34 for the Home Page. Not surprising.

On the search network, conventional wisdom failed. The Home Page had a lower cost per conversion and higher conversion rate than the City Landing Pages.

Here’s the data to examine:

Another reason to test search vs. content is conversion rates. In this instance, the content network outperformed the search network in terms of cost per conversion and conversion rates. This is not always true – it’s why you test.

What’s the lesson?

Search and content are very different.

The user engagement process is different.

The offers can be different.

The keywords can be different.

The ad copy can be different.

In fact, every campaign setting and ad group feature can be optimized differently for search vs. content.

Your conversion rate and cost per conversion are often very different.

When running reports, make sure you’re looking at just search or just content data. If you combine them, you won’t see an accurate picture of what’s really transpiring in your marketing efforts.

If you’re not testing, then you’re losing money. It really is that simple. Test, but test and measure appropriately.

At times I can be a lone voice speaking about the effectiveness of the content network. As with all marketing (and most decisions), it’s not that the content network is inherently bad or good (and the same can be said for search). It’s a distribution channel that needs to be treated differently than other channels.

Differences between search and content

The engagement process is different from search vs content. Search is about an active consumer looking for information. Content is about advertising products or services next to content where the subject is related to your offer.

I’ve written an extensive article at Search Engine Land about this topic: Search Ads & Contextual Ads Are Different! You Need To Treat Them Separately. Please read the article, it will explain in depth about the two types of networks.

Why treat them separately?

The above article also goes into why to treat them separately. To recap, since they are so different, the stats of one network have no bearing on the stats of the other network. You may have a landing page with a 10% conversion rate for content, and that same landing page just does not work on the search network. Conversely, you may have very specific pages for search and more general product and informational pages for the content network. It all goes back to assessing your goals.

How to view search only Search or Content stats

When you run a report in AdWords, in the Advanced Settings there is a label for ‘filter your results’. When you click on this, you can choose to see only content or only search based information.

When you run reports that only show you search or content, suddenly your account statistics will become more clear. Remember, there are some stats that matter significantly less for content (CTR, conversion rate) that are more applicable to search. Where some stats, such as cost per conversion is one of the top statistics to analyze on the content network.

More Information:

• How to optimize a contextual campaign
• Google suggestions on the content network
• Content network and reports

I’m trying something new to see your reaction. I receive a lot of questions via email about PPC; in fact more than I can ever hope to answer. Some of them are much more popular than others – so I thought I’d try blogging the answers to various questions.

If you have a question, feel free to contact us with the ‘PPC Question’ subject.

Today’s question comes from an AdWords seminar attendee (don’t worry, I’m keeping the questioners anonymous) and concerns how location targeting and the content network work together on AdWords.

Location Targeting Overview

First a quick word about location targeting. When you choose a region, Google shows ads based upon someone being in that region or using geographic keywords which would show the intent to find information within that region.

For example, if you were targeting Chicago with the keyword hotel. Your ad could show in two situations. First, someone searched for hotel within the Chicago metro. The second way is someone searched for Chicago hotel.

In the first instance, the user being located inside the metro, this is an easy decision – location targeting equals user’s location and the ad is shown.

In the second instance, the assumption being made is that if someone is explicitly looking for information within a metro, then their location does not matter as their intent is to find information within that metro.

Hopefully that makes sense. If not, please comment or contact me and I’ll do a full post on the two location targeting options.

Content Network & Location Targeting

The content network follows all the rules set at the campaign level, and one of those is location targeting. So, in that instance the quick answer to the question is ‘yes, the content network displays ads based upon location targeting settings’.

However, there is also a slightly more ambiguous answer. The content network scans a page to find what the page is about to best serve ads. Therefore, if you consider the second instance above – someone looking for information within a geography, then it stands to reason that sometimes that may come into play in showing ads on the content network.

Therefore, if someone is reading a geographically based article, say about Chicago hotels, they may still see ads for Chicago hotels even though they are outside of that region.

If someone is reading an article about hotels in general, and they aren’t located in our example city Chicago, then they would not see the advertiser’s Chicago location targeted ad.

The Quick Answer

Don’t you love this is at the bottom of the post?

The content network follows all campaign setting rules.

Location targeting is a campaign setting rule.

If someone is within your target geography reading an article that corresponds to your AdGroup theme, then your ads can be shown.

If someone is outside your target geography reading an article that corresponds to your AdGroup theme and the article is about the geography your are targeting, your ads can show.

If someone is outside your geography and the article does not include your geography, then your ads will not show.

I recently had a long conversation with Google (including the content PM) about the content network.

Here are a few suggestions from Google about the content network (most of these should not surprise anyone):

• Only the first 50 words in an AdGroup are used to determine its theme
• When an AdGroup has a large keyword list, Google’s matching isn’t as good and can get confused
• If an AdGroup is only shown on content, then it can be very useful to use more general words
• All keywords are treated as broadmatch when matching the AdGroup’s theme for content matching
• The Google recommended content bid is usually 75% of the search bid
• The typical content CPA (which I’m not sure if I can share so no numbers) is not significantly different (less than 10%) from search and content
• Of course, this is significantly impacted by bidding content and search differently
• It can be very useful to use site targeting with CPC bidding for ensuring your ads are shown on the highest converting content match websites

Content match resources:

• Search Ads & Contextual Ads Are Different! You Need To Treat Them Separately
• How to optimize a contextual search advertising campaign
• Block low quality traffic
• Peak behind the curtain to see to learn what AdSense sites are doing for you
• About smart pricing

On a side note, I finally responded to the comments about quality score and exact match impressions.

My latest article: Combat Click Fraud By Blocking Low Quality Traffic was published at Search Engine Land today.

Learn:

• How to block your ads from showing in certain countries
• How to block competitors from clicking on your ads
• See which content network sites are sending you traffic
• How to keep yourself from showing for keyword searches
• How to block content network sites
• Determine how many clicks you did not pay for
• Next steps…

It’s a bit of a follow-up to Content Network Optimization; but instead of focusing on how to optimize for the content network – it’s more about how to block low quality traffic (search and contextual) from the search engines.

enjoy.

My latest article on Search Engine Land is now out that goes into depth about contextual optimization:

The major pay per click engines, such as Google and Yahoo, include two different types of distribution: On their own search engine result pages, and on content pages elsewhere on the web. These two types of advertising, while often lumped together under the pay-per-click (PPC) label, are very different. Advertiser’s ability to control these networks and consumer’s interaction with these networks are completely different. Hence, they should be treated as completely separate types of distribution.

Often contextual advertising gets a (sometimes undeserved) bad rap. There are techniques that you can use to have a very effective contextual ad campaign.

Enjoy the entire article on SEL.