Should You Put The Content Network Into A Separate Campaign?

Friday, August 31st, 2007 Steve Baker 3 Comments

The answer to this question should be yes. After all, that way you can easily monitor it’s performance as a whole (rather than produce a separate report for it, or having to flick through your adgroups all the time). Also, you may find that different advert text works more effectively on the content network - creating a new campaign allows you to write an advert for the content network, and one for the search network. So that should be that then. But it’s not quite that straightforward. I recently took over the management of a campaign that was running on both the search and content networks. Thinking that this would be a good opportunity to assess the size of potential benefits from splitting the networks into separate campaigns, I did so. The result was disastrous! They had been receiving 80% of their traffic through the content network, and most of it disappeared! Slightly disappointed, I switched everything back. But the traffic didn’t return. So what went wrong? Well, it appears that Google’s content network uses different variables in its Quality Score, or at least puts very different emphasis on the different factors. Specifically, it appears to use the age of the campaign (or, to be more precise, the length of time that it’s been on the content network). So, the longer your campaign is running on the content network, the greater its exposure appears to be on the content network. And if you turn off the content network, when you turn it back on, you’re back to square one. This doesn’t strike me as particularly sensible, though I can see why Google might be doing it. If a campaign isn’t working on the content network, then it gets switched off quite quickly. So the fact that it’s been running for a while is a good indicator that it’s what people are interested in. Remember that the clickthrough rate is virtually useless on the content network, as it highly sensitive to things like the location of the adverts on the page. So what’s the correct move, then? I’d say that if you’ve got a successful, established campaign on the content network, then LEAVE IT ALONE!!! If you’ve just started out on the content network, or you are considering it, then you can certainly give it a campaign and budget of its own. My campaign has now recovered to about 45% of its former traffic. Don’t make the same mistake that I did.

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 6:53 pm

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3 Responses to “Should You Put The Content Network Into A Separate Campaign?”

  1. Amy Konefal

    Hi Steve - really great article! This was especially interesting to me because we had the EXACT same experience with trying to change the Content Network over to a new campaign for one of our clients. I panicked for about 1-2 weeks because our traffic and conversions plummeted after the changeover, but we decided to stick it out. At about week 3 or 4 we were starting to climb back up within the new campaign.

    It’s taken about 2 months to FULLY recover.

    After this experience I have to completely agree with your conclusion that the best course of action is to avoid moving your Content Network campaign once it is established…

  2. Eloi

    @ Amy: I hope you’ ve recovered by now !

    @ Steve: Good post here (again), it’s important to let people know that when you transfer a campaign, you loose all your historical data and the benefits of an improved quality score that go with it… I’ve seen it many times with people trying to improve a campaign and ending up destrying the quality score they have been working on…

    Plus, I seem to find that a new campaign always performs better than if this same one was placed in an old campaign (got me ?). I am working on it, but there seems to be a certain ‘bonus’ for brand new campaigns/accounts…

    What do you think ? Ever heard of anything like that ?

  3. Steve Baker

    Since Google doesn’t have a historical clickthrough rate for new keywords/campaigns, I assume that they use other factors to assess relevance, at least initially.

    I’ve noticed that once I’ve had a campaign running for a while, I don’t necessarily need the keyword in the title in order to get a great QS - but initially I do. So I would guess that the advert text relevance is used more heavily initially to detemine your QS.

    If this is the case, then it could be easier to get a high QS initially, but harder to keep it, particularly if your competitors’ adverts are performing well…

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