Bingo! Now what do I do with this website?

I got a comment (from Barak) on the last post suggesting I wouldn’t give up on managed placements and that “if you “catch” a winning horse on the automatic placements, I you should add it as a managed placement. In most cases it won’t fail and you’ll gain better control over the spend your’e allocating for this placement.”.

I begun writing my comment to that but then I realized it is something worth writing a post about since other people might have the same situation.

So, what to do when you find that one great website on the automatic placements that is performing really well and the CPA is right on target and even better?

As some of you may do, you have the option to target your ‘winning horse’ through your managed placements in the same ad group. My experience with this action is quite bad. Sometimes it worked, but many times it didn’t. Barak was right when he said you get the benefit of better control over the spend you are allocating for this placement, but on the other hand, if something is working, why fix it?

As I mentioned in my last post, Managed placements vs. Automatic placements, PPCHero wrote a post that describes my experience from taking ‘winning horses’ to the manged placements and explains why this happens. Basically they are saying, and I think they’re right, that if you move a site to the ‘managed placements’ you are actually saying to Google, ‘hey, this site is working well for me and I want more of it’, and then you can kiss good-bye to the discount you got in CPC there thanks to ‘smart pricing’.

I think the best way to go is to open a new managed placements ad group and add your winning horse there. This way you can check your ads performance on this website both on managed placements and on automatic placements. Check how many impressions your ‘winning horse’ is getting in each ad group and adjust the bids accordingly. Be prepared to pay higher CPC though, cause after all you are telling Google this site matters to you so the smart pricing system won’t take effect on this site anymore.

You might see that this site is not performing well on the managed placements after all and decide to stick with targeting it just through the automatic placements. But it might be too late to save your ‘smart pricing discount’. If this is really the case, then your last option might be to copy this ad group and place higher bid on this new ad group. Why copy it and place higher bid? because if you raise the bid on your old ad group you might lose other sites that are performing well since you will suddenly have many more websites you weren’t able to reach before because you had a low bid and these websites might consume your budget.When you open this new ad group, you might want to open a new campaign for it in order to control its budget.

What I described in the last paragraph really depends on the niche, the volume of traffic you get and your daily budget. You might decide to forget all about your ‘winning horse’ and start looking for a new one.

Oh man the content network can get tricky. This is really advanced stuff. I hope I didn’t mix things up but if I did let me know.

Last thing, sign up to my RSS feed to keep yourself updated with my latest posts. Thanks!

P.S

Thank you Barak for inspiring me to write this post.

Managed Placements vs. Automatic Placements

When you first create your campaign targeting the Google Content Network ( GCN) you need to decide if you want to go with automatic placements by using keywords to target the relevant sites and let Google decide what is relevant, or to go with managed placements by picking the exact websites you want your ad to show on and not trust Google’s algorithm to pick the places for you.

My opinion is that although by choosing automatic placements you take a risk that Google will show your ad on irrelevant websites (and it will happen), it is the better way to go since after all Google knows better than you all the relevant sites in their network, and if you try to find them yourself it will take you hours and you might end up missing that one killer site that could have generate mass amount of conversions.

As mentioned, the obvious  shortcoming of choosing the automatic placements is of course spending money on irrelevant sites. But the weird thing is, that you will most likely to find sites that on first glance seems irrelevant, but convert well. And who said that if you pick the relevant sites yourself you will get great CPA there? After all, if you found them easily, probably your competitors did the same, and the result is higher CPC on those sites.

PPCHero wrote a really good post about why your managed placements might fail even if you found those sites by using the automatic placements. Basically, Jessica, the post creator, wrote that when using the automatic placements the rule of smart pricing applies, while it doesn’t on managed placements, and that is why your managed placements will often cost more than the automatic placements (even if we’re talking about the same site). Smart Pricing, for those of you who don’t know, is a system of pricing Google is using in the content network that basically says that you will pay less per click where Google thinks your conversion rate will be lower than average.

I first planned to write a post about how to optimize in the Google Content Network but somehow I didn’t get there. Maybe next time…