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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The Rules To Help You Rule The Google Content Network
Posted under PPC for all by Erez ZundyI don’t about you, but I like Google’s content network. I get some really nice results there during the last 2 years or so. Before that I didn’t come near it since all the gurus told everyone to shut it off and I was part of the herd. (I’m assuming that who ever reads this blog already knows what is Google content network, but if you don’t then I suggest you go ahead and search some information on it.)
Since many are still trying to find their way through the content network I decided to share the rules of thumb I use when I create a content network campaign:
- Use up to 10 keywords in each ad group – I suggest using between 5 to 10 keywords. Unlike search, in the content network you are building your ad groups in a way that each ad group will represent a certain theme. For example: if you are promoting a clothing retailer, you should create an ad group about shirts and another about skirts. If you mix themes you might “confuse” the machine and thus get less impressions.
- Create the “themes” as specific as you can – This is in order to get the most impressions you can. If you are running a content network campaign that you are trying to expand, go and check if you could split your ad groups into more ad groups. For example: the ad group “shirts” you could probably split into many other ad groups like “men shirt”, “women shirts”, “polo shirts”, “sports shirts” etc..
- Don’t use exact or phrase match keywords – It just doesn’t matter.
- For each theme create 2 ad groups. 1 with text ads, and the other with image ads - The logic behind this rule is very simple: When you are running an image ad you are taking the spot of 3 text ads, meaning that you will basically need to pay per click 3 times the cost of a text ad. For this reason you will have to set a different bid to it and therefore you will need a different ad group. Plus, it will help you to better analyze and control which ad is shown where.
- You should always test dynamic image ads – Who said banners are dead? Even if you theoretically need to pay more for an image ad than for a text ad, the CTR that you will get on your dynamic image ads may help you cut your costs per click to be even lower than text ads.
- Test as many ads as you can – In the content network you have a lot of impressions on your ads. That gives you the opportunity to test more than 2-3 ads, like you usually do in the search network campaigns, and improve your results faster. Later you can take the winning ad and copy it into your search campaigns.
- Create your image ads in every available size – If you won’t than you are missing on out on what could have been great traffic. Google allows 8 ads sizes:
- Leaderboard – 728×90
- Banner – 468×60
- Small Square – 200×200
- Square – 250×250
- Medium Rectangle – 300×250
- Large Rectangle – 336×280
- Skyscraper – 120×600
- Wide Skyscraper – 160×600
- Make use of more “emotional” ads than informational ads – Remember that this is different from search. Search is more “pull” marketing while the content network is more “push” marketing. This rule does not apply on B2B products.
- Follow AdWords guidelines about image ads - Following these guidelines will save you time and trouble figuring out the errors.
What I described so far are the things I keep in mind when I’m building a new campaign that is targeting the Content Network. The thing that is missing here is how to optimize these campaigns and I plan on write another post to explain just that.
The Google Content Network (GCN) is a big opportunity and if you learn how to take advantage of it you will find yourself ahead of your competitors.
Thank you for the information, Erez. The idea to divide text- and image-ads into separate ad-groups is a good one!
* Regarding exact- and phrase match – do you mean that google simply does not care if you mark that a keyword should be exactly matched?
* I agree that you should test all sizes of image ads, but we sometimes skip the skyscapre-formats, since according to our experience they almost always perform worse than the other formats. Do you have a different experience?
Thanks for the comment Gustav.
As for your questions:
1) Google treats the keywords in your content network adgroup as 1 theme and not as separate keywords. They try to match that theme to the relevant pages on their network. Based on that, Google doesn’t need to care if you are using exact match or phrase match. Instead of using exact match and phrase match keywords, try to build ad groups with “tight” themes, so Google will better identify the kind of pages you wish to target.
2) I don’t think you can make it a rule that skyscraper perform worse than the other formats. I bet that on certain niches it won’t be the case. If you are on a low budget and you have noticed that the skyscraper is not performing well than pause it, but if you want to get more traffic and more conversions, use it since there are some pages on the content network that only let you use this format. And if you feel it will hurt your performance, open a new ad group for this size of banner and analyze its performance daily.
Hi Erez
Thanks for the advice!
Your friend Idan recommended me on your blog.
Separating the banner ads from the text ads really sounds wise.
cheers
Tal
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