Google Adwords Content Network

Here’s Google’s explanation of what the Content Network is…

The Google content network is the simplest way to reach millions of high-quality news pages, topic-specific websites, and blogs that web users visit each day. From global media outlets like The New York Times to niche publishers like BabyCenter.com, these sites partner with Google to give their readers useful and relevant advertising. There is no larger network for contextual advertising in the world.

Basically, all kinds of websites are looking to make money from advertising, and they can sign up with Google Adsense to get Google adverts on their site. If somebody clicks on these adverts, then they get a bit of the revenue, and Google gets a bit.

The adverts that appear are taken from Google’s PPC adverts, and are selected based on their relevance to a website (and bid). For example, if you have an advert for digital cameras, and you sign up to the content network, your adverts will appear on websites about digital cameras.

This can work very well, or very badly.

The fundamental difference here is that the people seeing your advert aren’t looking for you - they probably didn’t come onto this website looking to buy a digital camera (most retail sites don’t have Adsense - why would you place adverts for your competitors on your site?), and these adverts are often placed at the bottom of the page. So it’s not surprising that your click through rate is usually abject on the Content Network.

Happily, Google doesn’t count this against your campaign as a whole - it wants people to advertise on the Content Network, so it keeps the performance separate from the Search Network performance.

A lot of companies who advertise on Search don’t advertise on the Content Network, and since the traffic is usually of lower quality, those that do are willing to pay less per click. As a result, the cost per click is frequently far lower than on Search.

So, if you choose to advertise on the Content Network, you’ll generally get lower quality traffic that doesn’t cost as much. These can work out to be very profitable, or very unprofitable - I would say that it’s generally worth testing it - if it works, you can make a lot of money here; if it doesn’t, you can always switch it off.

You can set the bids for the Content separately - the option to do this is in your Campaign Settings.

One more critical point on this - when you start a new campaign, the Content Network is automatically switched on - you have to change your Campaign Settings to turn it off!

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 7:12 pm.

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