Intelligent PPC

I’ve spent a good portion of the last year evangelizing use of Content Network advertising, because it’s taken such a bad rap from the PPC community in general. Masses of PPC advertisers are convinced that syndicated advertising on the content network segment of ANY search engine ad platform is the Devil. The content network isn’t the Devil. The Devil is in the Details (har har) of how the content network gets “turned on” by default in any new campaign that an Adwords customer creates. If you don’t know any better, you’ll leave them on and hurt your own account optimization efforts.

But lately, I’m wondering if I may be overlooking who or what the Devil really is.

This month, Google quietly released a newsletter suggesting that advertisers become aware of the regional targeting section of their campaign settings because from now on (or until enough people get angry about it), the default setting for regional targeting will be the US and Canada, instead of just the US.

As a Certified Adwords Professional, I have long cultivated the habit of examining each and every one of the basic campaign settings any time I inherit a campaign or I’m asked to troubleshoot one. Toward the end of last week, I started seeing random campaigns in the middle of an otherwise US only account targeting Canada for no reason whatsoever.  The reason, it turns out, was that the owner of the account didn’t realize this change had taken place, and every new campaign they’d created in the last couple of days was suddenly targeting an additional country.

Blame Canada?

Are Canadians suddenly clamoring for US Dollars? No, I don’t think so. In fact, in reading the backlash on this change, I’ve run across a few Canadian Adwords advertisers who are hopping mad because the new influx of over-priced US search terms are cluttering up their ad space and driving their CPCs up.  I chose a random term – flash websites – and searched in google.ca in one window and google.com in the other and 6 of the advertisers are in both spaces. Maybe I should look up something else, like furniture… the top three spots are all for .ca domains for major brand names, but the three spots in the middle of the sidebar contain US advertisers. One is just a page running Adsense ads and the top spot there is for a localized southern US dealer. Interesting. One is for a site where you can’t even buy furniture – you have to ask for a dealer list. Still inconclusive. It will be interesting to see what happens to the ad space after there’s been more than just a couple of days’ worth of new campaigns created.

Is Google SATAN?

This change won’t be quite as impactful as the sneaky little “automatic keyword matching” was*. It won’t affect campaigns you’ve already got established. But it will bite a ton of PPC newcomers in the butt, just like the content network does. It’s a default setting – why would a newbie change it? Google knows best right? Yeah, just like the cure for poor ad performance is to bid up…

Google’s been a bit embattled (is that a word?) over the last year, what with trying to make a buck and all. And looky who’s dragging up and making waves now… Microsoft adCenter posted one of the highest single quarter percentage increases in PPC history last quarter – why? Let’s see, they gave money back to advertisers, yeah. And they improved ALL their management tools. They also are testing a desktop editor. Hmm… did Microsoft and Google get memos crossed or something?

What did Google do last quarter? Let’s see, they turned on a gadget to let them chose to run your ads for words you didn’t even put in your keyword list. Then they changed the quality score deactivation rule so that all these advertisers who had poor keywords still in their account but inactive because of quality score (“I’ll get to it when I have time”) suddenly found themselves spending $5 a click on these stupid words they hadn’t gotten around to actually pausing yet.

Insidious? Yes. Sneaky? Yes. Money-grubbing? Apparently… but satanic? Nah, but can’t you just hear Cartman in the sales meeting explaining how to fleece us all? Scary.

*the way they insinuated automated keyword matching into innocent accounts WAS the Devil! I apologize to Matt and Trey but the Southpark references were begging to come out.

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.