Many advertisers I know and have read in forums do not use the Google AdWords content network to advertise their site. The reason they say is poor quality of traffic. Well no more.

Google has recently improved its content network. Read more about this in their blog.

I will not dwell into what improvements were made by Google as you can read in the blog, what I will write here is how to get the best out of Google AdWords content network targeting.

1. Distribution of Keywords is important: The Keywords are very important as all the keywords in an AdGroup will form a theme and all those websites that “fit” into that theme will be eligible to display your Ad.

How to tackle this?

Paste your keywords in a spreadsheet. Let’s name it Sheet1. In another sheet (Sheet2) let the first row of every column represent the name of the product. Go back to Sheet1. Copy the first keyword, go to Sheet2 and paste it in the appropriate column representing the product. Do the same for the second keyword. Repeat this until you have pasted all the keywords from Sheet1 to Sheet2.

I can understand this is a cumbersome work, but it will surly pay dividends in the long run.

By doing this what you have done is distributed the keywords to represent different products. This will help Google to show your ad in only those websites that sell similar product and no other website.

Needless to say, these different columns should represent different AdGroups in your Adwords Campaign.

Why this is important? Lets suppose you sell blue and black widgets. Since you have separated your adgroups representing blue and black, the blue widget ad will not show in a site selling black widget and vice versa.

This way you will get highly targeted visitors.

2. Let content targeting be content targeting: Let the content network targeting campaign target the Google content network only. Its advisable that you opt out of the search network when you are targeting content network.

Why? Because a different mindset of people will be looking at your ads. These are the people who are not searching for your product but looking for more information on your or similar product.

3. Try a different landing page: See point 2 above. Since visitors coming from the content network are looking for more information, its better to first provide them the information of your product. Its common sense that this page has to be optimized differently than the page where visitors are coming from the search network.

4. Track everything: It’s important to track traffic coming from the content network. (Infact it’s important to track all visitors coming from whatever sources.)

Tracking will help you to study the behavior of your content ad visitors and implement changes accordingly.

5. No dynamic insertion of keywords in ads: Since ad shown is not keyword specific but theme specific, it is of no use if you create an ad with dynamic insertion of keywords.

Google will show default text of the ad in the content network if dynamic insertion has been used.

6. Test your ads: Don’t just sleep over your ads. Though the CTR of the Google content network does not effect quality score of the search network ads, its important that you keep testing your ads to get the best possible CTR for your content network ads as well.

7. Negative keywords: Just like the search network its important that you use negative keywords smartly. You don’t want people looking for free stuff see your ads. Do you?

Remember that content targeting also helps in brand building. So sometimes it makes sense to keep advertising in the content network especially if you want to build a brand. It will help in the long run.

Help me improve this blog. Please leave a comment.

Related topics:

1. Landing Page Optimization
2. Free Tips for Writing Good PPC Ads
3. Why Google AdWords