**A quick update to this post, a day after I published this we were visited by our Google team and they presented a new content network strategy. It is to only have 2-4 keywords per ad group with many, many ad groups to cover all of your tightly themed keywords. I ran back to my desk to try it out. I am still waiting to see the results, but its pretty much a given that you’ll hear about it from me one way or another.
###So I have seen the results and I have a nice bruise on my forehead from hitting my desk repeatedly with it. I am about to give up. The Google reps themselves admitted that its taken some time and testing to find out what works for Content advertising. I think they still have some way to go.
I have been running campaigns on the Google content network for a couple of years now, both text ads and display advertising, but lately I am finding it increasingly frustrating as Google doesn’t seem to apply the same laborious standard to screening and categorising new sites as they do when reviewing ads (I am still waiting a week for some ads to be reviewed).
For example, one very business oriented campaign running on the network has the following topics excluded:
- Error pages
- Parked domains
- Games
- Sexually suggestive content
- Military & international conflict
- Juvenile, gross & bizarre content
- Profanity & rough language
- Death & tragedy
- Image-sharing pages
- Social networks
- Video-sharing pages
Today I had to manually exclude the following sites from my campaign that would have easily fallen into the categories above:
- drugrunners.net (titled: A disturbing game of torture and death)
- MySpace.com
- justhelicopters.com
- onemanga.com
I did speak to our account representative at Google about these sites and was suggested that some tighter exclusions needed to be made. This means going in and excluding certain placements (categories). For anyone attempting to run a Content campaign on Google without the help of Google reps, this seems a little unfair.
Google’s AdWords help says there a several levels of automated and manual scrutiny applied when a site joins the network and even with this there may be a chance that adding these categories to the exclusion list will not always cover all sites of similar content on their network. The new web interface doesn’t allow you to manage category exclusions easily either (that is, when you go into the Ad Placement Tool and select web pages to target by categories, but are unable to exclude), so you need to manually enter them into the placement exclusion tool at the bottom of your Networks tab. For example category::Internet>>Online Goodies>>Skins Themes & Screensavers.
You can still grab some quality traffic off the network so running a content campaign is not a complete waste of time, but be prepared to spend some time excluding sites that have no business displaying your ads. This is a longer process than building out a negative keyword list for a search campaign because a URL doesn’t always tell you what the site actually contains.
Personally I am at the point of categorizing it with Yahoo’s network quality.