The Potential of AdWords Managed Placements
If you are looking at venturing into the realm of online advertising, you probably have had discussions with account managers at an online newspaper - like the Lansing State Journal - or perhaps at a broader network level like a Vibrant, which has large content market share. And if you are familiar with AdWords, you know that advertising on the content network is an option along with advertising on sponsored search engine marketing. And one of the options within advertising in the content network is a concept called “Managed Placements”.
Some background on ad placements, and the content network. In presentations and workshops that we conduct for those beginning AdWords, we immediately show them how to get into their campaign settings, and only select the search option. We always caution users to stay away from the content network due to the fact when enabled it can ramp up spending while attracting less than qualified traffic. Countless times I have looked at client accounts as we take them over to manage, and one of the major culprits for poor spending is the content network. For those of you that are completely unfamiliar with the content network - these are ads that are commonly found in an article, or a blog that you are reading, commonly marked by an Ads By Google label. (usual mis-targeted suspects involve how to get whiter teeth)
Now there are two options for advertising using placements - one in which your ads will be matched and placed on web content that Google feels are related to the keywords you are using in your ad group - and the other is called managed placements. Using automatic placements is a tricky process, and will be the subject of a blog post on for another day. Do not use automatic placements until you have a good understanding of it, and never, never use placements within the same ad group as a sponsored search campaign. They should always be separated. Again, another post coming soon.
Meanwhile, back to managed placements. Using this advertising platform allows you to hand choose where you want your placements to appear. Using the managed placement tool, you can sift through hundreds of websites to determine what is a good content match for your ads, and see what websites participate in the Google network. You can research by the following ways:
Enter in a specific URL to see if it is in the Google network, such as www.freep.com
Describe a topic: search engine marketing
Select from a pre-set list of Categories - ranging from Animals to Travel - with several sub categories
Select Demographics
As you browse the different research options, you are presented with a series of domains and sub domains to place your ads on. I always recommend that you preview the URL before you commit to advertising on it.
Think of advertising in this environment as you have been give free access to newspapers, article, blogs, jobsites across the Internet to advertise that have a strong match to what you are offering. Free impressions!! Well, it is free advertising, until of course someone clicks on your ad, and then hopefully you have targeted well and done your job.
When selecting, you have the options of evaluating average daily impressions a website receives, and types of ads allowed, with the options being textual, graphic, and video.
When embarking on this tactic, remember to place an emphasis on normal marketing tactics. Write at least 3 test ads per ad group so can gauge response. Be sure your Ad Delivery settings are at Rotate - (they are defaulted to Optimize) similar to what you would do in sponsored search. This will allow you to determine how ads are performing in enticing readers away from content and to your ad, while giving each ad a good chance to be served equally across your impressions.
And remember, response is not just clicks. It is measuring the traffic in Google analytics to get a feel for how the traffic is performing from each referring site. Like sponsored search, be watching your bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit, and per referring site to get a feel for what is working and what is not.
In summary - the managed placements function in AdWords offers a strong opportunity to gain a high number of impressions across targeted sites. Keep your traditional advertising principles in place, and monitor it for a strong test as a another potential avenue to reach customers across the web.
If you would like to to learn more about this effective form of digital advertising, please give our office a call at 517.580.3752, or email me directly at jford@netvantagemarketing.com.
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The placement tool within adwords is nice, but lacks much of the deep data that you can access with the Ad Planner Tool. I would recommend checking it out to anyone looking for real insight to their customers.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-google-ad-planner.html
All the best!
Vitaliy Levit