Google Adwords Content Network … Is it costing you money?

Welcome back, everyone! I apologize for the lack of posts during the past month, but I was on vacation the first two weeks of September and the end of August was very busy (mostly in preparation for my two week get-a-away). However, I am back at work, well rested and ready to fight the good SEM fight!

I got a great e-mail from Melanie Nathan up in Edmonton, Alberta. She has graciously agreed to write an article for our humble (but growing) In-House SEO blog. Melanie works as an in-house SEM for a company called Statusfirm.

Anyhow … moving on to the topic at hand: Google Adwords’ Content Network … Is it costing you money? Earlier this summer, I took over my company’s only Google Adwords account. It was my first foray into the PPC arena. I had a theoretical understanding, having attended conferences and read the blogs, but this was the first opportunity to get my hands dirty.

After learning how to navigate the site, I felt pretty comfortable with setting up competing ad campaigns and lo and behold, we have increased our CTR with the ad variations. And we continue to change them up, constantly looking for a better performing ad.

We are also diligent about our keyword research and our max bids. Unfortunately, many of the keywords we want to bid on are highly competitive and ultimately we were forced to use other keywords until we can get a bigger Adwords budget.

So, how can we maximize our PPC spending? Well, we took a look at our CTR and found that we were doing pretty good when our ads appeared on the Google Content Network. But, when we dug a little deeper and actually looked at the Web sites on which our ads were appearing, we discovered that virtually none of them were related to our business or products. And Google’s content network accounted for about 95 percent of our impressions … we were flushing money down the PPC toilet.

The solution? We removed our ads from Google’s Content Network and are focusing our efforts solely on the keyword search platform. We warned the directors that our CTR may decrease with the lack of impressions, but after only a few days, we were pleasantly surprised to see that our CTR actually increased! Of course, at the same time we removed our ads from the Content Network, we changed the URL destination of the ads and added new keywords. Regardless, the changes we made had an immediate impact.

The point, Gary … get to the point. In our case, we found that our ads were not performing well on the Content Network. If you have an Adwords account, make sure you examine the sites on which your ads are appearing and make sure they are relevant. In our case, we have a product with the acronym OVA, which apparently is very common in some Japanese anime; so our ads were showing up on dozens of anime fan sites and blogs and we were actually getting pretty good CTR rates … can you guess why? Hmmmm, I’m thinking of a phrase that begin with “click” and ends with “fraud.”

That is our lesson for today. Remember, this blog is for real SEMs of all experience levels who are in the trenches every day. We are here to share our experiences and hopefully learn from each other’s successes and failures.

You can learn more about me (why you would want to, I don’t know) by visiting my SEOMoz profile at http://www.seomoz.org/users/view/44253. You can e-mail me at gary.cope@gmail.com, or IM me at garyjamescope (AIM and Yahoo).

If you would like to submit an article for the In-House SEM blog, fire away! This is your blog too … however, as supreme ruler of this blog, I have the power to decline and/or edit any articles that are submitted. Don’t worry; I’ll be gentle. Capiche?