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Peter Grundner
Peter Grundner, a top advertising and marketing professional for over 20 years, has been responsible for the success of many companies, including a recent stint as Dir of Marketing for a website that was acquired by a large publisher for tens of millions of dollars. He is now a full time Home Business Entrepreneur and founder of myEDConline & How2SucceedOnline.
Peter Grundner has written 8 articles for SB Informer.
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How to Double Your Response in Google Adwords

The #1 mistake that costs online advertisers thousands.

Peter Grundner

June 04, 2007

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So what's the #1 mistake that costs the average advertiser thousands? The answer is encompassed in two simple words – “Content Network”.

95% of advertisers make this mistake.  As discusses in my other article titled “How Google evaluates Your Adwords Campaign”, Google works very differently from other search engines as far as Pay per Click campaigns are concerned.

So what's the #1 mistake that’s costing the average advertiser thousands when doing a Google Adwords campaign?  The answer is encompassed in two simple words – “Content Network”.  Google will probably never tell you this because they make too much money from unknowing novices spending more than they need to due being unaware of their “Content Network”.

When setting up any Pay Per click campaign, Google has three main areas in which you can display your ad:

  • Google Search
  • Google Search Network
  • Google Content Network
By default, Google has their Content Network checked for you on their ad set-up page.  You will get lots of clicks from responders to these extended relevance sites, however, the quality of this traffic is horrific at best.  Not only is the traffic terrible, your click rate will be much lower when including the Content Network.  One more negative likelihood is that click fraud within the “content network” is much greater. What's worse, if you remember my last article, one of the key factors that affects your ad position is your “average click rate" so this can be a double negative whammy.  By just de-selecting “Content Network” (in the “Edit Campaign Settings”) you will double the click rate of your campaign which will then also give you better ad positioning. 

Remember, the better your click rate, the higher your ad will be positioned.  If your click rate drops below about 0.50%, your ad will rarely display at all.  On the other hand, if you have a click rate of 1% - 3% or even higher, your ad will be positioned much higher than if evaluated by price alone.

An additional way to improve your ROI and lower your cost per click is to examine where your traffic is coming from within the Google Search Network.  If you determine that a lot of traffic is coming from partner sites like "ask.com" for example, you could eliminate the “Search Network” targeting as well and save some additional money.  Advertising on these partner sites directly will save you about 50% for each click.  The downside, of course, is that it will take more time to manage the extra campaigns.  It also depends on your overall budget.  The more you invest, the more it is worth looking at setting up a separate campaign with these Search Network Partners and deselecting that option in Google.

The bottom-line is that, just by deselecting “Content Network” you will dramatically improve your results and save huge amounts of money. Look for our next article, where we’ll look at the 2nd biggest mistake when doing Google Adwords.  Sign up for our “Marketing Insight” ezine and be the first to view it.

The article is brought to you by Peter Grundner of P&T Enterprises


                   



Add comment Add comment (Comments: 1)  
Title: Interesting June 5, 2007
Comment by Boris Mordkovich

Peter,

Good article.

However, it's not always so easy to find out which Google Partners your traffic is coming from. And even if you do, it's not always possible to advertise with them. Even Ask.com - it puts its own ads on a different location than the ones it syndicates from Google, so it's not entirely the same.

However, I definitely agree with your analysis of content network. With the click fraud prevalent on the smaller publishers, it definitely lowers the quality of traffic. Plus, people that click on content ads are in a different stage of their buying cycle (just saw the ad, as opposed to actively searching for the product) and thus less likely to buy it.

Boris Mordkovich
www.AdWatcher.com

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