Hi! My name is Erez Zundy and I want to share with you the fact that I have no idea what to write here about myself yet. What I do know is that I will post here anything I know about PPC. I have 3 years of experience in PPC marketing, both as an affiliate and as a PPC manager for other unique clients. In this blog I will discuss many espects of the PPC for both affiliates and PPC managers. I will tag my posts by either "affiliates" or "PPC managers", depends on the topic, so keep an eye on that. Ohh yeah, you should also follow me on twitter: 
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Managed Placements vs. Automatic Placements
Posted under PPC for all by Erez ZundyWhen 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…
Erez,
I do agree that automatic placements usually convert better than managed placements campaign (with the exception of brand campaigns which are a different story)
That being said, I wouldn’t give up on managed placements so fast.
If you “catch” a winning horse on the automatic placements, 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.
Barak,
I started writing my reply to your comment and then I realized I’m writing too much so I might as well make it a post. Check it here: http://www.ppcisme.com/bingo-now-what-do-i-do-with-this-website
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