Fresh AdWords Tip: Separating Google Search & the Content Network

Even More Organized AdGroups If your adgroups are already well organized, take that extra step to draw out your adgroups even more to achieve close to wysiwyg (what you see is what you get); the name of the adgroup is essentially the keywords within. Each name of each adgroup should contain the two root or parent keywords that are a basis for the whole group. Broad, Phrase, Exact, Plurals, and the occasional two to three word qualifier added to the beginning or end of the key phrases can also be included in each adgroup. Out Organize Your Competition & Win Once this is done, you will have a great advantage over 95% of your competition who just form one campaign, and one adgroup, and dump all keywords in. You will be able to see which groups of keywords are working, and which are not, at a glance. “Working” can be defined in many ways, but some of the most important goal metrics, depending on what type of client, is lower cost-per-conversion, higher conversion rate, and higher click-through-rate. Thoroughly organizing adgroups is a prerequisite to the super AdWords tip for only those serious about squeezing every last bit of performance out of his/her AdWords as possible, in which I am about to reveal. Salient Google AdWords News Affecting Your Accounts The best news for AdWords advertisers occurred this year. Google did not advertise this, because they have to pay a commission on clicks for the content network, so they would rather you at least use the Google + search partners IF nothing else. I know it has only been within the last few months that this new change has taken place. A Tip off the old Blog Google barely alluded to this allowance on the official Inside AdWords Blog recently; otherwise it would have been bigger news. I put the clues together, experimented, and discovered an option I have wanted to do for a while now. Finally Separate, but Not Always Equal The content network and Google search traffic are different. The content network is ad placement on sites that host “Ads by Goooooogle,” aka AdSense. Some accounts do very well using the content network, and some fail miserably. What’s the News? For a while advertisers have been allowed to opt out of the content network, but can now opt out of Google search for any given campaign. This is good news for AdWords advertisers because now you can separate the two, Google search + partners AND content network. Don’t opt out of either as a whole, but separate each into identical campaigns so that ads are only severed to each platform based on the campaign. Identical Keywords & AdGroups with One Difference You can make an identical campaign with all of your keywords and adgroups and you will be able to see at a glance how well your ads and keywords are doing as a whole on the content network for one campaign vs. Google search + partners on another campaign. I warn you, this will blow your mind and change many of the perceptions you had on your web traffic. That is, unless you have always kept a close eye on that “pagead2.googlesyndication.com” referrer in your server and metrics logs. AdWords Editor Tool Separating and copying all of your adgroups into a different campaign may seem like a daunting task. It would be in the normal AdWords interface, but luckily, the AdWords Editor tool allows you to copy and paste adgroups easily, so it should not take long at all. Normal AdWords won't allow you to copy and paste full adgroups, but this tool does along with many other advantages I will not get into here. Download it and play with the features. Separate Ads for Different Types of Audiences Now that your search and content campaigns are separate, you will now be able to write separate ads for the two campaigns without having to get a new Google AdWords account. This will allow you to achieve a higher quality score by changing and experimenting with ads for the search network and the content network simultaneously, never having to pander or sacrifice performance for one platform over another. You will be able to test using A/B split, but this will be different than before because your metrics will be kept pure. Your numbers won't be all jumbled and thrown in and out of the search and content network, giving you a disproportionate understanding of your account’s performance using mixed data. Your stats will no longer be thrown off, and to improve campaigns you will no longer have to take a politician’s approach to writing your ads -- moving toward the middle and making them more likable on the whole instead of dominating on each platform using different methods and ad copy. One Client Example In approximately the last 30 days a campaign I managed received around 373,677 impressions, 315,009 were from the Content Network. That is almost 84%! The other 16% (58,668) impressions appeared on Google + search partners. This account was doing quite well in the content network, but not as well in the search network based on the type of client as well as the ad chosen. Content ads have to do a better job at interrupting the reader of the article/directory/forum in order to make he/she click. This is unlike search ads, which do better if they have the keywords in the headline because of bolding. Bolding is irrelevant to content ads because normally the whole headline is bolded regardless. The content network is much more like traditional advertising, and less of a direct response medium such as search. Daily Budget Split When considering separating your campaigns, you must also consider divvying up the daily budget. On this particular client I split up the 50 dollar daily budget into 43% Google search + search partners (AOL, Netscape, Dogpile), and 57% content network ( Ads by Goooogle). The reason I split it this way is over the last thirty days that has been the percentage of money spent on each ($409.15 spent on Google + partners, $534.82 was spent on content network). 30 Day Click Share Sixty three percent of the clicks (451) came from the Content network over the last 30 days and 37% (269) from Google Search + Partners. 30 Day Lead Share Nineteen of the leads that came purely through ads (not organic) came from ads on Google + Search partners. Twenty-six came from Google's Content Network. Let it Show the Numbers Most of these stats will be able to be seen much easier now that these two different types of campaigns are separated. This should be true for your account(s) as well. Good luck!