Intelligent PPC

In another pay per click strategy post in another life, we broached the subject of how to advertise wisely on the content network by splitting out your campaigns so that your content network ads are running in a campaign that’s dedicated to the content network audience. But what about the complaint that campaigns on the content network are often unwieldy and money-grubbing, spiraling out of control the moment you blink?

Enter Placement Management from Google – think of it as working the old style content network in reverse. Instead of going into a campaign set-up trying to dig through those “categories” and add a list of sites you think your ads might perform on, you can now set up your content network ads to blast all over the content network to start with (only for a few days). Run a Google Placement Report after a few days to see where clicks are wasted and then selectively block the money pits as you find them. Don’t let your ads run too long with out checking in on this report or some of those keywords are liable to get away from you. I set a Rainlendar reminder for 48-60 hours, then I run the Google Placement Report, sort by highest spend, and whack out the sites I don’t want to waste money on anymore.

It’s easy to be seduced by big brand names… “wow, I can run my ads on MySpace!” Great, millions of teenagers will see your ad for a free trial download of the latest professional firewall protection on the market and you’ll pay for hundreds, maybe thousands of clicks made by unqualified buyers who don’t need professional firewall protection – they just responded to the ad that said “free download.”

The second most important key to success on the content network is controlling it. Keep tabs on the content network and you can easily control the spend and make the most of the dollars (or cents, in some cases) that do get spent there.